User Tenure - How Long Do Your Users Remain Active on Your Site? We define user tenure as the number of days a user remains engaged with our site. It's the length of time between initial registration and when the user becomes inactive. The difficulty is when do you define a user as inactive - after 30 days, 60 days 90 days of not logging in? Have the web analytics experts agreed a standard on this one? We tend to use 30 days but I have seen other companies go for 90. May be we are being too hard on oursleves and 30 days is too draconian a cut off.

I guess it will depend on the type of site - an ecommerce site is probably going to care less about tenure than a community/social networking site. On the other hand it depends on what they sell - I engage with Dell to replace my printer cartidge every 3 months - does this mean I have become inactive and will reappear as a new user. I doubt it - I am recognised as soon as I log back in. However, if I haven't been to my Facebook page for 3 months is it likely that I will return? When is the last time you went to a virtual world like Second Life? I can't even remember my user name so I guess I am inactive there. Could this be the definition I am looking for? If only I could tell when my users have forgotten their login details. How about when an email is permanently bounced?

That leads on to what you do with this information. If you know that as soon as somebody fails to log in for 3 months there is a very high chance they will never return. Then is there some marketing intervention (targetted email - not much use if the email is junk) that can be employed to re-activate these users and bring them back to the site. This could make an enourmous difference to site retention.

Labels: experts, inactive user, social networks, user tenure, web analytics

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