: Returning visitor stats reliably over longer periods of time in Google Analytics I'm looking into how useful returning visitors stats in Google Analytics are over longer periods of time, such

I'm looking into how useful returning visitors stats in Google Analytics are over longer periods of time, such as two or three years.

It seems that the __utma cookie is set to expire 2 years from set/update, so this suggests that this cookie should be updated each time the user visits the site, and the 2 year expiration reset.

Would I be right in thinking then that it's reasonable to expect the returning visitors data to be no less accurate over longer periods than it is in the last year, for example?

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@Heady270

When you are talking about the timescale of years, the data won't be very accurate. Cookie expiration is not even the main reason. Over the course of two years I would expect a large number of visitors to lose their cookies altogether for reasons such as:

Clearing the cookies manually
Switching browsers
Using your site on a different device (phone, tablet, home computer, work computer)
Reinstalling the operating system or factory resetting a phone or tablet
Buying a new computer, phone, or tablet

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: Returning visitor stats reliably over longer periods of time in Google Analytics I'm looking into how useful returning visitors stats in Google Analytics are over longer periods of time, such

More posts by @Cooney921

: How do I measure/analyze/estimate how big of an overlap the users of my website have with another website I have a quite big website. I'm interested in knowing how big the overlap is between

: Are there downsides to serving UTF-8 with a BOM? Working with a client, I've just noticed that all of their files are being saved as Windows-1252, but they're serving them with charset=utf-8

: How to redirect keeping the referral without server-side redirects? I have an HTML page hosted in Dropbox that some external websites link to. I want to redirect to a different page using only

: Create a macro for links' href attribute in Google Tag Manager In Google Tag Manager, I'd like to track with an event label in Google Analytics the clicked links href attribute. On our front

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