More ways to view hourly data… and more!
October 27, 2011
We just deployed a bunch of changes to hourly data, amongst other things:
- Goals and Revenue now support hourly data, so you can more easily see your best converting and most profitable times of day. However, we just started doing this today, so earlier dates will not have hourly data. Anytime we add hourly support for something, it essentially requires 24x as much storage space, which is why we only do it for a few types of data (currently: visitors, actions, tweets, clicky.me short URLs, goals, and revenue). If you saw how big our databases were already, you'd cry and then realize why this is necessary.
- Hourly averages — there are three new options in the drop down menu for hourly graphs:
- Same day of week average — example, this Monday vs the average of the last 4 Mondays
- Weekday average — Today vs the average of all weekdays (Monday-Friday) from the last 4 weeks
- Weekend average — Same as Weekday average but for Saturday/Sunday only
These are all insanely useful, particularly the first one!
- You can set "same day of week average" as your default trend comparison in your dashboard preferences, in which case your hourly graphs will also default to displaying this mode. We initially coded in support for weekday/weekend stuff too, but they generated WAY too many queries; there were up to 20 extra pieces of data that needed to be pulled from the database for each item in any given report, and it couldn't be optimized since there are "holes" in the date ranges.
- Daily graphs default to 28 days instead of 30 days, to more cleanly fit week boundaries. We think you will find this especially useful when comparing vs "previous period". An example is shown below.
- Compare menu fixes/additions — When viewing daily graphs, the "Compare…" menu has been broken for a while now. Not sure when it happened but we finally got it fixed. We also added some more options to it that were much needed (revenue, goals, campaigns, pages, and tweets, to name a few).