Interpreting Return Frequency Dimension with a Page Name

[DW24]

Hi,

I recently discovered the Return Frequency dimension, and need some help putting the dimension into context.

1. If I were to pair this with Unique Visitors and add a page as a segment, would this show the number of visitors who landed on the page, and then returned to any page on the site within these time windows?

2. When breaking down the return frequency buckets by Page, are these the pages that the visitor viewed at any point, or only during the return frequency time window?

Thank you for your help!

DW

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Return Frequency itself is based on Visits, so every page within a visit would have the same return frequency applied....

Example:

Visit 1 (first ever visit, therefore not counted as "return")

• Page A
• Page B
• Page C

Visit 2  (2 days later)

• Page D
• Page A

Visit 3 (5 days later)

• Page E

 If you are looking at "Page A", you would get a "1 to 3 days" return frequency on all pages in Visit 2, but Visit 3 won't show up at all since Page A wasn't hit during that Visit.

Now, when it comes to the segment, it depends on how your segment is defined.... if it's a HIT or Visit based segment, the results should be the same (at a high level count), since whether you are just looking at "Page A" in isolation, or "Page A" as part of a visit, Visit 2 will be returned in your results. But, if you are using a VISITOR based segment, then if the Visitor has hit "Page A" within the reporting period, then Visit 2 and Visit 3 would be included (even though "Page A" wasn't a part of Visit 3).

If you were to break down the pages in your table, ignoring segmentation for a moment all pages within the returns will be included.

If you are using a HIT segment, only "Page A" would show, since you are restricting the results to just that one page. A VISIT segment will return "Page A" and "Page D" as those were both a part of the visit with "Page A"; and if using VISITOR segment, you would get Pages A, D and E.

[DW24]

Thank you for the explanation!

An additional clarification question based on your example: If I'm using a Hit or Visit-based segment, would the interpretation of that data be "Page A has return frequency of 1-3 days for x number of unique visitors"? Since Hits and Visits cannot span across multiple days, I'm wondering how the data is calculated.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi, 

Technically a visit "can span across multiple days if it starts before midnight, and ends afterwards (insert a wink here), however, that doesn't really matter... the return frequency is based on the metric "days since last visit", which looks at when the visit was determined, and the calculation between them.

But whether your segment is Hit or Visit scoped, it doesn't impact the calculation because Return Frequency itself is applied to all hits within a visit.

Whether the page I visit is the first, second, fourth, or twenty-seventh hit within a visit... the "time since my last visit" was still the same.

So let's say my last visit was on July 15, and my next visit was on July 20th... that is 5 days...  every page in the July 20th visit will tell me my return frequency is "3 to 7 days".

Return Frequency is not calculated on each page, it's calculated based on the visit.