When we say we want to know "How many people visited my site 3 times last week?" and call the answer an indicator of loyalty, we are kidding ourselves.
There is a big difference between someone who hits your site 3 times in one day and someone who comes back 3 different days over a given week or month.
The former is what you could call "fleetingly obsessed." The others are loyal, habitual users. They are the ones we need to know about.
The current visit metrics simply count visits and provide no transparency into calendar-based timeframes.
We need a plug-in and/or metric that would let us reliably say:
#/% people visited my site at least # times yesterday (or any calendar day)
#/% people visited my site at least # different days last week (or any actual calendar week)
#/% people visited my site at least # different days last month (or any actual calendar month)
Yes, I know about the visit count plug-in. It does not help with this.
We're about to try rolling our own code for this, but I was hoping Omniture staff & friends would have some insight or solutions.
Once that is solved, I want to apply the same model to a consumption (page view) metric.
