Repeat Visit Tracking with WiFi: The Retention Metric That Predicts Revenue

Why Repeat Visit Rate Matters

Takings are roughly the number of different guests × how often each one visits × average spend per visit. Of the three, how often guests visit is the one your own service and follow up affect most directly. A guest who comes twice a month instead of once doubles what they spend with you without spending more per visit.

Repeat visit rate is the share of guests who come back within a set window. It moves before the takings do. If it starts to slip, you hear about it weeks before the monthly figures show it.

Till data rarely tells you this on its own, because most card payments are not linked to a named guest. A guest WiFi login is.

Defining Repeat Visit Rate for WiFi Data

A workable definition: of the guests who logged in for the first time in a given period, the share who logged in again on a different day within N days.

Pick the window to match how often people normally visit you:

7 days. For daily habit venues: coffee shops, gyms, quick service lunch spots.

30 days. For casual dining, bars and most neighbourhood venues.

90 days. For occasional visits: fine dining, spas, golf clubs, hotels with returning business guests.

Three rules make the number trustworthy:

• Count visit days, not sessions. A phone that drops off the network and reconnects twice in an hour is one visit. VoqadoWiFi counts distinct visit days per guest in the venue's local time.
• Track the guest, not the device address. Phones now use private, often changing WiFi addresses. Apple devices default to an address that rotates every 2 weeks on networks with weak or no security (Apple Support), which covers many open guest networks. A repeat rate built on device addresses will read low. One built on the guest record from the login holds up.
• Only measure windows that have finished. Guests who first visited 10 days ago cannot yet count towards a 30 day rate.

Repeat rates depend on venue type, location and how you count a visit, so your own trend over time is the useful comparison.

The Tipping Point: Visit 3

Visit three is a useful point to design around. Once a guest has come in on three separate days, they are choosing you rather than passing by. That is why VoqadoWiFi's Regulars segment starts at 3 or more visit days in the last 60, with the most recent under 30 days ago.

So the question to track is simple: of the guests who have been in once or twice, how many reach a third visit, and how quickly?

If you run your own welcome emails (for example in Mailchimp), put the effort into the guest who has visited exactly once. A guest who has already been back once is on a better path and may not need an offer at all. Spend the incentive where it changes something.

Cohort Analysis: Are You Improving?

Group guests by the month of their first login (the January cohort, the February cohort and so on) and work out each cohort's 30 day and 90 day repeat rate. Export the guest list as CSV and a spreadsheet will do this.

Illustration, not a benchmark: if 120 guests first logged in during January and 42 of them came back within 30 days, January's 30 day repeat rate is 35%. If July's cohort was 150 guests and 66 came back, July's rate is 44%. Something changed between January and July. It might be your follow up, your menu, the season or a new office block next door. Cohorts tell you that something changed; they do not tell you what, so note what you changed and when.

If repeat rates fall cohort after cohort, look at the visit itself first: service, wait times, prices, a new competitor. Email will not fix a visit people did not enjoy.

Campaign Design Around the Tipping Point

With visit three as the target, each group gets a different job:

• Guests with 1 visit: a thank you and a reason to come back. Goal: a second visit.
• Guests with 2 visits: a specific, near term nudge ("back this week?"). Goal: a third visit.
• Regulars: recognition rather than discounts. Goal: keep the rhythm going.
• At risk (was a regular, no visit for 30 to 89 days): a personal note, maybe an offer. This is the group where a message most plausibly changes behaviour.

Only message guests who agreed to marketing. Ask for that with a separate, unticked marketing box rather than folding it into the WiFi terms; VoqadoWiFi's explicit consent mode does this.

VoqadoWiFi's own post visit messages (a thank you after the first visit, and "we miss you" notes at 30 and 60 days without a visit) are off by default and switch on venue by venue as guest email goes live. Frequency caps apply: at most one message per guest per venue in 7 days and four in 30 days.

Measure the result the same way you measured the problem: did the repeat rate of the targeted group move compared with a similar group you did not message? Without that comparison, you cannot tell a working campaign from a busy month.