Overview

Audience Behavior Reports report on key statistics of users based on behavioral groups that they fall into including newness, frequency, and engagement.

Overview

Audience Behavior Reports report on key statistics of users based on behavioral groups that they fall into including newness, frequency, and engagement. These reports allows for a couple different views:

  1. New vs. Returning reporting: GA consolidates traffic statistics based on whether a visitor is New or Returning.
  2. Frequency and Recency: Reports which provide a breakdown of how often (frequency) people visit and how recent (recency) visits have been.
  3. Engagement: Report which breaks down session durations (how long sessions last) and Page Depth (number of pages people view during a session).

Sample Audience Behavior Reports

New vs Returning Report

The New vs Returning report provides traffic, behavior and conversion statistics segmented by whether the user was New or Returning (previously visited),

Frequency Report

The Frequency Report segments users by the number of sessions on record (the number of times they have visited) to show a breakdown of how often people generally visit the website.

Recency Report

The Recency Report segments users by the time since their last visit to show a breakdown of how frequently users visit the website.

Duration Report

The Engagement – Duration segments sessions by how long they last to provide a breakdown for how long users spend on the website.

Page Depth Report

The Engagement – Page Depth report segments sessions by the number of pageviews/session to show a breakdown of how many sessions last for how long.

Real World Uses

  • Gives a very high level view of how often users visit and for how long the sessions last.

Critical Thinking

  • Consider your goals! High frequency and engagement is not always a business objective. In some cases, a short visit which converts to a lead is better than mutliple long visits where goal conversion never happens. Take this data with a grain of salt.

FAQs

  • Q: How does Google figure out if a user is “New” or “Returning? A: Each user is tracked on each device which they use using “cookies” which are behind the scenes tracking mechanisms. If Google detects a user who is “cookied”, then they are classified as “Returning”. If Google does not detect the “cookie”, then the session is considered “New”. It’s actually a bit more complicated but this is the general idea.