The returning visitor log

When a returning visitor arrives, Spectare reads a visit log stored in their browser localStorage and passes it to the classifier as a signal. Someone who read your pricing page last week and came back directly carries no referrer and no UTM parameters, so without that history they look like a brand new visitor and receive your default content. The visit log is the strongest behavioural signal Spectare has.

Slots run in the browser and read localStorage directly, so returning visitors have always been handled there. Zones render on your server before the page is sent, and a server cannot see the visitor's browser storage. Plugin 1.4.0 closes that gap: when you enable Returning visitors in zones under Settings, Spectare, the visitor's last three page paths are written to a first-party cookie on your own domain, and your server forwards them to /api/assemble/ssr alongside the zone request.

The feature is opt-in rather than automatic because adding a cookie to your site is your decision, not Spectare's. Enabling it requires a deliberate choice in the plugin settings, and you should check your cookie policy before turning it on. The cookie is never sent to another domain, nothing is stored on Spectare's side, and slots are unaffected either way.

The transient cache key in the plugin now includes the visit path, so a returning visitor's personalised zone is never served to a different visitor who shares the same referrer and campaign. The sanitiser on both the TypeScript and PHP sides accepts only plain absolute paths and strips whitespace, quotes, angle brackets, and backslashes before anything reaches the classifier, capping at 64 characters and three entries.