Website Statistics Report: Returning Visitors

Overview

This report shows the number of time visitors return to your site. Each time a visitor requests a page from your site (that has the tracking code on it) a cookie is placed on to the visitor’s computer / browser which is used to identify them. Each time they return they are identified allowing us to place them in to one of the following brackets:

• First time visitors
• Visitors who have viewed your site two to five times
• Visitors who have viewed your site six to ten times
• Visitors who have viewed your site ten or more times

This is shown in a data table and a pie chart as is shown below:

Website Statistics, Returning Visitors pie chart

It is important to note that this uses Cookies to track the visitors if an individual accesses your website from multiple locations, i.e. home and office, or even uses the same computer but a different web-browser, Firefox and Internet Explorer, they will be classed as different visitors. This is because Cookies are stored in a cache by the web-browser and so are reliant on the visitor using the same computer / web-browser combination.

Obviously it is good for your site to have as many returning visitors as is possible. It is up to you to provide a reason for them to do so but the usual ground rules are:

• Content is king. Keep putting up new and engaging content and people will come!
• Build a RSS feed into your site so visitors are notified when you have posted new content.
• Allow visitor participation, such as forums and feedback posting.

Report Options

As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. If you decide to perform work on your site to increase average return count use the date feature to step back to a time period before the work was carried out to determine if your enhancements are successful.

There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.

How this Report Works with the Log

Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increasing the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.

If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average return count make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.

To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …

• Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
• Ensure that your log is as big as possible.