Frequency is a
Visitor Characterization that shows how many times a visitor did something on
your website, such as visit or engage in a specific activity. Frequency can help you understand the degree of engagement,
but not the type of engagement that a visitor has with your website, explains Avinash Kaushik in
Web analytics 2.0: The art
of online accountability & science of customer centricity. The length of time in which the frequency is measured is important,
however; the same number of visits has different meaning depending on whether
you’re looking at a time period of ten years or two months, Kaushik shares in a blog post. Frequency
only refers to returning visitors, as there is no frequency for new visits.
A post on Mashable suggests that segmenting your audience according to the frequency of
visits enables you to develop strategy according to how often they visit, or
how many visits until they make a purchase. While studying
frequency metrics, you can also consider frequency together with specific pages
visits to determine what content is of interest to frequent visitors. Also explore
where frequent visitors come from – is there one channel that sends a large
number of them?
Review frequency metric through the lens of the website goals
It is vital to have clearly articulated goals for the
website including a clear understanding of expectations for user frequency.
With your goals established, the frequency metric gives you insight into what
you may need to do on your site. For example, some sites have daily offers or
news that is updated throughout the day. Those sites expect visitors to show up
daily at least. A tweet or Facebook post sent several times a day, or a daily email
may send visitors to a restaurant or retail site to find out about each day’s
special. Other sites, such as blogs, may update weekly, so a weekly or monthly
email to a constituency group may be a good way to remind them to visit.
Understand and strategize around frequency trends
Trend data about frequency can tell you about a visitor’s
level of engagement. The CEO of wedding-planning website Loverly knows when a user becomes
completely engaged. On the site, users can create folders of images like
dresses or flowers for their wedding. In the Mashable post, the Loverly CEO says that when a user creates
a second bundle, “she is hooked and becomes a power user,” visiting more
frequently and engaging more with the content.
Knowing that frequency trend about a user gives the company
some direction. First, they may want to target messaging to visitors who have
made only one bundle to entice them to come back and build more. To do this, they
could send new photos similar to the ones the user has already saved, or
suggest new topics that the user has not started a bundle for yet, such as shoes
or decorations. And when the user has made her second bundle, they can target
ads or other promotions to her to further engage her in the site.
Content is key for impacting frequency
Enticing content is a vital component of maintaining and
increasing frequency. The content must remain fresh and meet a need or
expectation of the visitors in order to provide interest to readers and compel
them to return. Some companies may run out of content ideas for their site, or
simply not have the resources to continue generating content. Douglass Karr,
founder of The Marketing Technology
Blog and CEO of DK New Media, explained that he helped a company in this
situation by hiring a content writer to focus on general information and best
practices for the industry, and focused on keywords that had not been optimized
by the company. As a result, the company increased the number of
keywords it was ranking for, and increased its overall rank, as shown in the
table below.
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