As of March 16th, 2022, Google announced that the mainstream version of Google Analytics labeled “Universal Analytics” will be deprecated in July 2023, with Google Analytics (360) enterprise depreciating in October 2023, presenting Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as the future of the platform.
To find out more, download our up-to-date guide to GA4 and Privacy-First Measurement.
What is Visitor Loyalty?
Visitor Loyalty in Google Analytics helps you identify the website visitors that are of most value to your organization. Loyal visitors display higher levels of engagement and often exhibit a greater propensity to fulfil your organization’s goals. Visitor Loyalty is made up of four reports: Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit and Depth of Visit.
Loyalty
The Loyalty Report shows you how many times visitors are returning to your site. Ultimately, you want visitors to be coming back to your site, so if the vast majority of people are coming to your site only once, then they’re probably not engaging well with your content and steps should be taken to rectify this flaw in your web content.
Recency
Recency indicates how often visitors return to your site. This report can provide an actionable guide for determining how often content on your website should be updated to ensure people returning find something new and engaging on each visit. This could mean updating your company blog or newsletter if visitors are coming back regularly.
Length of Visit
The Length of Visit Report shows you how long visitors are hanging around on your site. The longer they’re on there, the more chance you have to convert them. Sometimes, visitors staying a certain amount of time on a page can be considered a conversion in itself – Google has released a feature that allows you to set time as a goal.
However, if your site is poorly designed, and visitors are forced to spend long periods of time extracting the information they want from your site, you may actually begin eating into your visitor loyalty levels. In such a case, an easy to navigate site may result in shorter visit lengths but higher loyalty and recency.
Depth of Visit
Depth of Visit essentially presents the data from average page views in a more user-friendly format. Although more page views suggest higher levels of engagement, it can also increase the opportunity for visitors to leave the conversion process. Effective website design can reduce the number of page views necessary for conversion based on audience information requirements.
Considerations
An effective way to use Visitor Loyalty in Google Analytics is to the report in conjunction with the Visitor Trending Reports. Although the Trending reports can give you a great snapshot about whether your campaigns are working to drive traffic etc to your website, the Visitor Loyalty Reports can then be used to determine how valuable the visitors being driven to your site as a result of these campaigns are.
If your campaign is attracting disloyal visitors, perhaps a different strategy should be considered. However, the layout and design of your website is crucial to visitor loyalty and must therefore not be ignored as a key variable.
This concept can be extended to compare campaigns and highlight which ones are providing the best long term value – and are therefore actually contributing to achieving your organization’s goals. The Visitor Loyalty Reports are therefore essential for determining your ROI and identifying campaigns that are not providing the optimum level of return.
Benefits for Different Sectors
Multi-National Corporations
- Determine long term success of campaigns
Domestic Corporations
- Further segment data to find actionable, valuable segments
Medium
- Identify and measure website goals
Membership Based Organisations
- Measure membership base engagement with your website
Public Sector
- Better understand the needs of users based on loyalty levels
To Wrap Things Up
XPON is an award-winning Australian data and technology company that has been a Google Partner for over a decade!
We hope you have found this blog helpful, and as always, if you have any questions about Google Analytics or any other products within the Google Marketing Platform, please get in touch to book a call with our Google experts.