PubForge Blog

Most public media sites, even those with a strong news focus, show relatively poor overall loyalty stats, with the average visitor coming twice a month or less. The standard report segments in Google Analytics don’t give a very clear picture of what differentiates the loyal visitor, who returns twice a week or more to your site, from the visitor who beams in from a search results page and is never seen again. This makes it difficult to do testing that targets the loyal visitor.

Fortunately, this can be overcome by using the newish (still in beta) “advanced segments” feature at Google Analytics. Here’s how to create and use an advanced segment that looks at monthly traffic from the loyal visitor–one who visits the site between 8 and 100 times during the selected period (I limited the visit number to 100 on the assumption that people who hit your site more often than that are using it for a browser home page):

1. Go to your Google Analytics Dashboard
2. Under Settings, select “advanced segments”
3. Select “Create new custom segment”
4. Under Dimensions, expand “visitors” and drag “Count of visits” over to the “dimension or metric” box.
5. Under “Condition” select “Greater than or equal to” and give it a value of “8″
6. Select “Add ‘and’ statement”
7. Drag “Count of visits” over to the “dimension or metric” box.
8. Under “Condition” select “Less than” and give it a value of “100″
9. Name the segment something like “Deeply Loyal” and click “Create Segment”

Now the new custom segment can be compared with standard segments such as “All visits” using the advanced segments tab on any report page.When I applied the segment to traffic at North Country Public Radio, I got some immediately useful information:

1. Frequent return visitors account for a little over 20% of visits and of page views. This means that my loyal visitors don’t visit more pages on any particular visit than does the general visitor.
2. A little over 30% of views to NCPR’s top three pages (home, news, and listen) come from the loyal segment. So loyal visitors are 50% more likely to visit one of the top destinations than are visitors on average.
3. The real jump, however, comes with features that are visitor-contributed or visitor-interactive. More than 50% of visits to our popular Photo of the Day page come from the loyal segment. More than 40% of visits to our top blog destination come from the loyal segment. Increases over average loyalty of 250% and 200% respectively.
4. The lowest scoring pages among the loyal segment were individual story pages, with less than 10% of views coming from the loyal segment. Individual stories are primarily reached via search, or via syndicated feeds, and so are often outside our core visitorship.

These findings suggest a number of strategies:

1. To increase the overall loyalty of visitors, increase the opportunities for interaction and content contribution on your top destination pages.
2. The loyal segment is more likely to already be a paying supporter, so member messaging on the pages most popular with loyal visitors might focus on membership upgrade and referrals to other pages with interactive features.
3. Popular pages more often viewed by the less loyal could be a target for new member recruiting, content-specific micro-giving, “about the station info,” and referrals to pages related by search topic.

Dale Hobson
North Country Public Radio