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Page/Screen Revisit Analysis

  • 1.  Page/Screen Revisit Analysis

    Posted 10-03-2016 12:15 PM

    Introduction: Analysis of a Page or App Screen's Revisit Rate (on a per-session basis) seeks to understand the number of distinct times a given session or user views the same page or app screen during that session and understand the implications of low to high revisit rates.  View volume alone (either total number of views, sessions, or users that viewed a given piece of content one or more times) is not always the best indicator of that content's efficacy.  More views does not always mean better content.  In many cases, a highly viewed page or screen may mean problems on that or nearby pages/screens.

    Note that this analysis requires a combination of the pre-existing metrics of Views and Sessions/Visits per distinct page or screen on your site or app, which will vary by analytics vendor.  The metric can be derived by dividing the number of Pageviews/Screenviews by the number of Sessions/Visits per distinct page/screen either within our vendor (if supported) or outside within a spreadsheet or other analysis tool.

    Analysis Overview:

    For the purpose of this analysis, let's define the user behavior pattern of viewing the same pages several different distinct times during the same session can be cause by three key reasons:

    1. Transitory. The page is simply a necessary transitory page that a user must view several different times during the course of a normal session.  For example, think about the intersection of your driveway and street you live on. You probably travel through it several times per day, not because it's your favorite place to drive (or maybe it is), but because you have to travel through it in order to get anywhere.

    2. Interesting. The page is a page that is really interesting or important.  Real life example: the floor in front of the coffee maker at your office.  You probably step on it many times each day because you love your coffee (or tea, let's not forget tea!).

    3. Problematic. The page is a problem point in the user experience and users are forced to visit it many times during the session because of a user experience problem.  At my house we had a smoke alarm malfunction recently.  It would go off every few hours for no good reason.  The floor under that smoke alarm became "highly visited", but not because we liked standing there!  No, it became hated... as did the alarm.

    While there could be other reasons, generally, high frequency revisiting can be lumped into one of these three categories.  The reasons won't translate to any particular metric number (i.e. revisit-rates of 1.2 won't mean bad page while 3.7 means hated page).  Rather, by identifying pages with varying session revisit rates you can identify pages with anomalous behavior patterns whereby you can begin to determine what might be going on.  

    For example, the Homepage will often have a revisit-rate close the the mean average for your site and is usually just transitory or interesting.  A section main page may have a high rate because it is transitory when moving between pages deeper within the site.  However, if you have a page that is, say, the start of a process to convert or fill out a transactional form and it has a high revisit-rate, that may indicate a problematic user experience at that page or later in the process.  Conversely, pages that have a very low revisit-rate that you would expect to be highly interesting, for example, may indicate navigational problems or unfavorable content or user experience.

    Analysis Benefits: 

    1. Cut through the noise of volume-based Pageview metrics and gain insights into page quality as it relates to page content, location, and navigation.
    2. Quickly identify pages with anomalous viewing patterns that would otherwise be hard to identify.

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    Caleb Whitmore
    Principal Consultant & CEO
    Analytics Pros (Corporate Account)
    Seattle WA
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