New report "Visitors Recency", days since last visit

[matt]

We could provide a new report: days since last visit

Example

You have 1000 unique visitors;

• 500 are new visitors
• 300 visited your site 1 day ago
• 100 visited your site between 2 and 5 days ago
• 10 visited your site between 5 and 15 ago
• etc.

[matt]

See note in  http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/1434#comment:11

[matt]

Example: For the month of August,

Last visit the same day: X

Last visit 1 day ago: Y

Last visit 2 days ago: Z

..

Last visit 7 days ago

Last visit 8-14 days ago

Last visit more than 15 days ago

Keep a counter 'last_visits_days' in log_visit

See also  http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/536#comment:5

Recency see  http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/resource/resmgr/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf

Recency
Type: Count
Calculation:
Time since a unique visitor performed a specific action of interest to the analyst.
Notes:
The action in the above definition can be anything of interest to the analyst - visit, purchase,
download, use of a certain service, etc. Most often recency is associated with either a visit or a
purchase. Further, the unit of measure for recency can be at any level of time -- hours, days,
months, etc.
As an example, let us say the action of interest is the purchase of a certain product. Visitor A
last purchased that product 30 days ago and Visitor B last purchased that product 90 days ago.
The recency for Visitor A will be 30 (if measured in days) or 1 (if measured in months) and for
Visitor B will be 90 (if measured in days) or 3 (if measured in months).

[matt]

See also #2031, #566, #2448 for ecommerce report

[matt]

Schema update at least, to be done in 1.2 as part of 1st party cookie implementation.

[bohare]

Not sure if this can be accommodated into this feature, but I would especially love to see this data in the Visitor's Log. (i.e., for each visit in the log, when was the last time this visitor came).

[capedfuzz]

I'd like to start working on this ticket, but I've got a couple questions:

0) This report will be part of the Engagement section, correct?

1) How exactly will the report look?

2) Assuming bohare's suggestion is doable, would it be ok if the extra information was added to the Date column of the Visitor's Log?

Thanks in advance!

[matt]

Great news! :)

0) Makes sense, The page will get bloated but I guess it's ok (we can organize better later)

1)

Days Since Last Visit
0
1	
2	
3	
4	
5	
6	
7	
8-14	
15-30	
31-60	
61-120	
121-364	
365+

Should use the visitor_days_since_last field

2)Yes doable, but not displayed by default (too much noise). I propose to display it on hover over the date (in title tooltip).

[capedfuzz]

Came across a problem while implementing this. The 'days since last visit' report can't be applied to new visits. I can make the report only deal with returning visits, or I can display the count of new visits in the report. In the latter case, I could prepend a row to the report so it would look like this:

Days Since Last Visit
New Visits
0
1
2
3
...

It would show more information, but might be a bit confusing.

Which approach do you think is better?

[matt]

I think it makes sense to report "New visits" in the report.

[capedfuzz]

Patch for issue #583, made for revision 5398.

[capedfuzz]

Just uploaded a patch for this issue. The patch is made for revision 5398. Could you review it and let me know your thoughts? Thanks in advance.

One note, sorting is disabled for this new report, though I could change this.

[matt]

capedfuzz, great work. I have granted you SVN access (congratulations). With great power comes great responsability :)

Enjoy the ride!

[capedfuzz]

(In [5411]) Fixes #583:

Added "Days since last visit" report under Visitors > Engagement. Added tooltip to visitor log that displays the days since a visitor's last visit for each visit.

Notes:

The new report has been added to the Metadata API. Augmented range label beautification so non-range labels could be displayed if desired. Modified archiving code to allow further refinement when summarizing data over ranges.

[matt]

Great commit!! Unfortunately it does not work for me in my basic test. See attached screenshot. Does it work in your piwik?

Otherwise all looks good

[matt]

all zeros

[capedfuzz]

If I use the visit generator, I get a result that isn't all 0s. If the specific visits you're viewing are exactly one year since the first visit, then I think I found the problem. Either way, I'm going to do some more testing (and possibly add another integration test).

[capedfuzz]

I did more testing, and it seems to work fine for me.

I added the following code to the integration tests (not committed, just locally):

	public function test_OneVisitor_AllYear()
	{
		$apiToCall = array('VisitorInterest.getNumberOfVisitsByDaysSinceLast');
		$dateTime = '2010-01-01 11:22:33';
    	$idSite = $this->createWebsite($dateTime);

		for ($i = 0; $i != 370; ++$i)
		{
			$newDateTime = Piwik_Date::factory($dateTime)->addDay($i)->getDatetime();

		    $visitor = $this->getTracker($idSite, $newDateTime, $defaultInit = true);
		    $visitor->setUrlReferrer( 'http://referer.com/page.htm?param=valuewith some spaces');
			$visitor->setUrl('http://example.org/index.htm');
			$visitor->setForceVisitDateTime($newDateTime);
			$visitor->DEBUG_APPEND_URL = '&_viewts='.Piwik_Date::factory($dateTime)->getTimestamp();
			$this->checkResponse($visitor->doTrackPageView('page view'));
        }
        
        $this->setApiToCall($apiToCall);

        $this->callGetApiCompareOutput(__FUNCTION__, 'xml', $idSite, $dateTime, $periods = array('year'), 
            $setDateLastN = false, $language = false, $segment = false, 
            $visitorId = false, $abandonedCarts = false, $idGoal = false);

        $this->callGetApiCompareOutput(__FUNCTION__ . '2', 'xml', $idSite, '2011-01-03 11:22:33', $periods = array('year'),
            $setDateLastN = false, $language = false, 
            $segment = false, $visitorId = false, $abandonedCarts = false, $idGoal = false);
	}

and everything worked as expected. Can you give me more information?

[capedfuzz]

(In [5428]) Refs #583, #584, #2031

Fixed bug with ranges that, for some new range reports, caused certain visits to not be counted. This fix will cause a cosmetic change in the two older reports in the VisitorInterest plugin (the 'visits per duration' & 'visits per actions' reports).