The power of user recency

Web analytics tools are not about accuracy. No matter how much you try you will never get 100% accurate data. Don’t worry about it… you don’t even need it. The power of the data stays in trends and they can be satisfied with 95% or 90% or even less accuracy.

However, one thing is 100% sure in any web analytics tool out there. When a user is being identified as a returning user, you can bet on it that that’s how it is. Don’t get me wrong here. There are returning visitors that your tool sees as new ones (they delete their cookies) but all identified as returning are definitely users that have previously visited your website.

No more accuracy excuses in this area. Time to get to do some analytics work. Segment only for returning visitors data and let’s dive in for some insights. Here are some questions most of the web analytics tools can answer:

How often do returning visitors come to my website?

Here is how a tool like Google Analytics presents us this information:

Recency Report in Google Analytics with "Returning Visitors" segment activated

Once you know how often they visit you, use this indicator to know how frequent to update the marketing campaigns to leverage a better retention. In the above image 40% of the traffic visited at least 1 day before the last visit. 10% of the visitors visited at least 8 days before.

The next thing would be segment the website traffic only for those visitors and see if they have a higher conversion rate. If yes, that’s the response for how often to update the blog or send a newsletter.

What’s the conversion rate for your returning visitors?

Do the returning visitors convert better than the new ones? If yes, a good strategy could be to boost up retention marketing campaigns.

When I say returning visitors I am not talking about visitors who have purchased something from you and now are coming to the website for support. Those visitors should be filtered out. Most of the analytics tools allow you to do that by using custom variables.

After finding the conversion rate for your returning visitors dive in to find out the following:

• how often does a visitor comes to your website before converting?
• how many days between the first visit and the visit when he became a customer?
• do returning visitors bounce more or spend less on the website?

What are the entry points of returning visitors?

Go to Top Landing Pages while having activated the "Returning Visitors" advanced segment

I guess homepage will be the biggest hit here, but look deeper. You might discover some low hanging fruits. It can be a good idea to recheck the copy of the landing pages that are main entry points for returning visitors.

Tackle homepage as well. Some little JavaScript hacks and you will be able to offer a different heading copy or call to action to your returning visitors. Test. Experiment. Write to us

One thing is for sure: returning visitors don’t have the same behavior as new ones. Don’t believe? Just compare the data in your analytics tool. Now, that we got this straight, don’t you think it’s not very efficient to offer the same website experience both to new users as to returning ones?

How can you act on it?

Well, if you just own a blog, there are at least 2 WordPress plugins you can use to differentiate between new visitors and returning ones:

• What would Seth Godin do? (love this plugin name)
• Published articles since last visit (I contributed to the development of this plugin as well)

If you own a complex website things can be easy as well. We are rolling out beta accounts to our behavioral targeting platform which you could use to do just that: offer a different user experience to returning visitors.

So, how would you like to treat your returning visitors?