One of the most irritating things about Google Analytics is it doesnt give you stats related to the time of day (this is something we use Woopra for)… well that was the case for me until I worked out how to do this using a custom report.
Hits by time of day are important as it helps you identify not only when your getting the most hits, but also when you’re attracting the least amount of traffic which comes in really handy if you’re swapping some key information and/or want to make significant changes to your site.
This simple report has started to make us think. As our most popular time for new hits is 8pm, should we stagger the telesales team to provide phone support up to 9pm? Should we turn off adwords between 12pm and 9am as we only get around 3-4% of visitors during this time (although is this worth it as the saving would be minimal)
Ok heres how to quickly set up this report:
- Open Analytics
- Go to Custom Reporting
- Create a new report
- Give it a name
- Drag Entrances from the vlue Metrics Panel
- Drag Hour of the day from the green Dimensions panel
- Preview/save the report.
Easy as that.now you too will be a little more informed.
4 comments ↓
Thanks for sharing this information. I have been using GA for years and thought I just forgot where to find the time of day report…but nope, it never existed! The time of day report is remarkably consistent from my experience of the past dozen years or more though…4am (local) is the time when nobody is online. People come in between 8-10am…then break for lunch and dinner and go to bed around 11pm. My site is “hyperlocal” so there is no time zone shifting effect.
Bottom line: start your sysadmin tasks at 1am so you are done by 7. Deploy new content early so people can see it when they get in to work. Don’t push new content out at 5pm. NEVER deploy code changes on Friday afternoon!
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Thanks so much for this advise!
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Just what I needed. Well explained, needed to get the custom reporting done on this. Google should explain it better!
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Thanks for that. I noticed a client’s site was down and I wanted to try and figure out when that happened. The hourly report allowed me to get insight into that problem.
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