google analytics: how to read the "visitors recency" graph???

[FrankThinnes]

Hi all,

hope you had a safe and pleasant journey back home... I am back in
office, back in the ordinary world of everday busines... Hence my
question:

Has anyone an idea how to read the "visitors recency" graph? It always
shows that a large majority (more than 85 %) of our visitors have
visited the site 0 days ago ??? This cannot be right. Is it a bug? Or
should we fix something with the google analytics code? And has anyone
detected other "bugs" or strange things with google analytics?

Thank you for your posts!

Free hugs for all ;-)

Frank

[Timothée Guicherd]

Hi all,

I am Timothée Guicherd, website editor of LabforCulture.
Even though I replied to you personally Frank, I think my answer may
be useful to other members of the group. Here it is:

The "Recency" view is intended at showing you the return rate of your
visitors, and should be watched together with the "New / returning"
visitors tab. It summarizes the visits and classifies them in
different buckets, based on the time elapsed since the PREVIOUS visit
on the site from the same user.

Here are some different situations:
- let's say you are a first time visitor, Google Analytics assumes
that your last visit is your first one - thus you are put in the "0
day" bucket.
- let's say you visited your site on the 2nd of the month, at 10:00.
Then you visit it again on the 3rd, at 11:00. The time elapsed between
these 2 visits is more than 24 hours - this visit will be put in the
"1 day" bucket (identical behaviour for 2 days, 3 days, and so on).
- the last situation is a bit tricky: let's say you visited your site
on the 2nd of the month, at 10:00. Then on the 3rd, you visit it again
at 9:00. Time elapsed between these 2 visits is less than 24 hours,
that's why this visit will be put in the "0 day" bucket too.

This obviously raises a bit of a problem: very frequent visits and new
visits will be put in the same "0 day" bucket (granularity is not very
high). That's why I use it in conjunction with the "new/returning
visitors" tab, to have a better overview of the visitors.

You may also want to use the "Loyalty" function which can be very
useful to track... loyalty of your visitors.

Best regards,
- Timothée

[Seb Chan]

Hi frank

This means that 85% of your visitors are visiting for the first time.

This is completely normal.

You should set a filter up to exclude visits from computers in your
office - otherwise your figures, especially the repeat visit figures,
will be inflated by you and your team!

Seb

Sent from my iPod

[FrankThinnes]

Hi Seb and Timothée,

thank you for your replies. Actually, we have that filter. According
to our old statistic tool, we had about 50 % new visitors - which
corresponded to our observations and the overall echo of users. I will
try to find the truth in this...

Frank

On 18 Dez., 03:36, Seb Chan <sebsn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi frank
>
> This means that 85% of your visitors are visiting for the first time.
>
> This is completely normal.
>
> You should set a filter up to exclude visits from computers in your
> office - otherwise your figures, especially the repeat visit figures,
> will be inflated by you and your team!
>
> Seb
>
> Sent from my iPod
>