How many visits last month have previously visited the same specific directory?

[Biggsy50]

Our segment 'Return Visits' below is great to see how many visits to our website are returning ones, i.e. 10,000 visits last month & 2,000 were Return Visits.

"VISIT

Visit Number is greater than 1"

However, I'm struggling to work out (or find other posts' solutions) to say how many returning visits have previously seen a particular directory, e.g. last month there were 1,000 visits to the '/sports/' directory of my website. Of those 1,000 visits, x visits had previously visited the '/sports/' directory at any point. So this could have been within that last month period or actually 10 months ago. Does anybody have a segment solution they can demonstrate to me please? Thanks. 

Other solutions I've seen show:

1. the visitor having to have previously seen the '/sports' section but within the same 'last month' period.
2. or have used the 'Visit Number' dimension being >1, but haven't tied the 'Visit Number' to that specific '/sports/' directory, just overall.  

It seems a fairly simple "ask", I just can't figure it out :s

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Unfortunately, there is no way to create a "dynamic section" to check if the user visited the same section more than once... you may have to create a segment for each section individually:

This segment looks at visitors who in the last 30 days visited the Sports section, then visited the sports section again after at least 1 visit.....

But it is locked to Sports... if you need to do similar checks for "News", "Opinion", etc I think you will need to make additional segments....

OR if you just care in general about "visitors who revisit sections" but don't really care about the sections, and are just looking for a general UV count... you could probably create a series of OR statements within the one segment:

This would look at the different sections in the pattern... news, then news OR sports then sports OR .....

But again, you couldn't use this segment with your site sections report to see which sections are getting re-visits because someone who hit sports then sports and hit news once would still correlation to "sports" in the resulting workspace.... this joining together of segments would just be good for a raw count of "users who revisit the same section"

[Biggsy50]

Thanks for your support Jennifer - yes, your top screenshot is what I'd put together so far, showing visitors who'd visited '/sports/' in August (1k) and then visited '/sports/' a second time in August (maybe just 400 of that 1k).

My client is wanting to know how many '/sports' visitors in August  (1k) had EVER visited '/sports' before (which might actually be nearer 500-600).

So it seems like a simple question but one that's strangely difficult to answer in Adobe Analytics 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

If it's "EVER visited '/sports' before" then you should be able to just drop the "last 30 days" parameter.. however, your "EVER" will be subject to the data retention policy of your analytics... that would be a problem no matter what system you use.... 

Let's imagine your data retention policy is 2 years... and you are looking specifically for "sports" in site section.... any hits from more than 2 years ago have had the data deleted... so there is no way to know if these users ever visited Sports before then.... 

However, your data retention policy should be enough for most purposes....