How can I make these Google Analytics numbers add up? (Frequency & Recency)

Question

Here's a screen shot from Google Analytics. It's my last months traffic, and this is the 'Frequency & Recency' tab.

So I believe that if I add up all the numbers under 'visits' I get 11,432, which is right, and if I add up all the numbers under 'pageviews' I get 14,785 and that's right as well. But, let's take the last line - the last line appears to say that 71 people, visited more than 51 times each, and they viewed a total of 243 pages between them - that doesn't seam to make any sense - did they view 9% of a page each time?

So that's clearly wrong - what's the error in my calculation?

Answer 1

The numbers aren't cumulative as Sdoering said. If they were, the number of visits would keep going down while the number of visits go up. This isn't the case, so you each line is separate.

I think you have to read it as "all the people that visited my site 50+ times made 71 visits in total", so in this case it's a single person that visited 71 times and viewed 243 pages. I'm not 100% sure because there are an odd number of visits under 2, but Google's numbers are known to be off. Or at least the numbers they show you.

Answer 2

As far as I understand this "slide" in Google Analytics, it is cumulative.

I'll try to explain with an example:

User 1: 1 Visit
User 2: 3 Visits
User 3: 2 Visits

This would show as

Count of Visits    |    Visits    |  Pageviews  |    Users
                   |              |             |
           1       |      3       |      3      |    Users 1 & 2 & 3
           2       |      2       |      2      |    Users 2 & 3
           3       |      1       |      1      |    Users 2

So the user making 3 visits (in this example every visit is just one pageview long) is counted in all three buckets, his first visit in bucket 1, his second in bucket two and so on.

That would mean, that only the pageviews of the 71 visits, that where produced by users returning more or equal to 51 times to your site. So these visits would have on average 243/71 pageviews per visit (or about 3.something).

It is quite difficult to explain, as English is not my native tongue. But i hope, I could help.