Google Analytics - Visitor Loyalty

While there are a few exceptions to the rule, I can be pretty confident in stating that you want return visits to your website. Yes, it's always good to be driving more and more new visitors to your site, but most often the real value is derived from those that return to your site (beside you that is). These are your 'Loyal' visitors.

If you run an e-commerce website, your return visitors are extremely valuable, because they've either gone away and researched a product and are now ready to buy, or they're just returning to buy again because they were pleased with the previous experience. A B2B site needs loyal visitors because these people are there looking for support, or looking for news and events related to the company they've invested in. Blogs and forums live on loyal visitors. These serve to provide CGM (consumer generated media) and refer others to your site. Put simply, loyal visitors have higher levels of engagement, and measuring your visitor loyalty can provide you with great insight into how compelling/valuable your content is perceived as.

In Google Analytics, the first report under Visitor Loyalty is just the Loyalty report, and it's a simple bar graph:

As you can pretty easily see with this site, almost 80% of the visitors to this site have decided that it wasn't what they're looking for,or simply not worth returning to. This site happens to be a B2B website with a fantastic product offering, so they really need to examine their highest bounce pages to see why people are being turned off!

Now I have the same Loyalty report, but from a popular blog. Here's what a loyal reader base looks like in graph form!

This Loyalty report can be an excellent tool for setting goals for your website. Perhaps you have a rather steady flow of traffic, and it may be resource expensive to find new ways of driving traffic to your site. Why not instead set a goal of increasing your visitor loyalty, and get more value out of the people already visiting your site?

Here are a few ways to increase visitor loyalty on your website:

• Add a blog which people can subscribe to the RSS feed for
• Write content that's worth returning to read!
• All users to interact via comments - they'll return to see who's responded
• Add a forum to allow users to interact and get support
• Build free tools into your site that people will come back to use
• Feature a new game/special/user/widget on a regular basis, so that your visitors will return to see the latest feature
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, which in turn will regularly drive them to your website

If you have any other ideas or methods that have worked for you, feel free to add them in the comment field below!

Visitor Recency

This graph provides a quick visual breakdown of the last time your visitors cames to your website. It looks like this:

My first idea of this report was a complete misconception. I initially thought this was a time chart who visited when. But then I realized that this information is already in the Visitor Trending report. Also, it just didn't make sense that 26,000 visitors were on my site only a day ago!

What the Visitor Recency report actually indicates is the number of days elapsed since a user's last visit, or a time-based measure of their loyalty. The '0 days ago' metric means that there's no past tracking cookie, therefore they haven't visited before (from that computer), and are most likely a new visitor. Quite often this will be a large portion of your visitors, but with forums and blogs you should have more in the 1-7 days ago range.

Though there's nothing directly actionable in this report, it still gives you an idea of the nature of your visitors.

Length of Visit

The Length of Visit report shows a breakdown of the amount of time that people are spending on your site, or at least how long they have the browser window open on your site.

A good goal is to lower the percentage of people in the first two rows. These people are on your site less than 30 seconds, and there's really not much you can do in 30 seconds on a site! So you may need to refine your design and content to engage your visitors better, keep them on the site long enough to consider buying, registering, etc.

Though you generally want people on your site longer, there is one case where lowering the time people spend on your site is actually a good thing. This would be if you're improving your navigation system, perhaps implementing fly-out menus, providing links for people to get to desired information faster. If you can effectively lower the time spent on your site without increasing abandonment, there's a good chance you'll increase visitor loyalty and conversion, as it means you're enabling visitors to get to the information they want faster!

Depth of Visit

The depth of visit report shows a breakdown of the number of pages viewed by your visitors.

Those that viewed only one page are the ones that constitute your bounce rate. Those that are viewing 5 pages or more are very actively engaged in your content. The same principles apply as with Length of Visit. It's in your best interest to lower the number of those viewing only one or two pages, but optimizing your site navigation can result in a desirable lessening of the average visit depth. Obviously, getting a visitor to the checkout pages in 3 steps is highly preferable to it requiring 6 steps, which would mean 3 additional funnel abandonment opportunities!

Summary

Some people may view these reports as mere "wow stats", that they provide a few interesting details to which you can say "wow", but nothing more. Well, as you've seen, they can provide valuable insight into how engaging your content is, whether or not it's worth returning for or investigating further. It can also help you set goals, and measure the effectiveness of new content and navigation.