Google Analytics – Hours & Days Report

Here is a free Google Analytics report showing visits, pageview, bounce rate, and visitor type metrics in a couple of ways you don’t often see them:

  • By ‘Hour of Day’
  • By ‘Day of Week’

There are 2 versions of the report, one for ‘all sites’, and one for ‘ecommerce’ sites:

Background & Description

Here’s an example from the report. Below, you see I’ve sorted it by ‘visits’ descending, and this tells me that Hour 21. (9pm) was the most popular within the period I was looking at. (eg, I could be looking at a period of a month, and it would add up all of the visits within each ‘9pm’ hour to come to the total ‘134,108’):

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These are useful for everyone, but especially for content sites or anyone interested in ‘content marketing‘.

The 4 tabs in the report cover:

  1. Hour of Day – when do you get most visits/pageviews. If you set the timespan on this over (say) a couple of months, this helps you figure out when you’re most visited. Experiment with post times, try and fill in the ‘quiet’ gaps, etc, and see how you can improve based on the data.
  2. Day of Week – very similar to the first tab, but for day of week.
  3. Day + Hour Combined. If you sort this descending by number of visits, it tells you very quickly which ‘hour of the week’ your site is most visited.
  4. ‘Linear’ Date + Hour. This shows you, over any period, which were the most popular periods on the site. (in other words, rathe犀利士
    r than saying ‘9pm was the most popular over the entire period’, it would say ‘9pm on 7th january was the most popular single hourly period’).

You can apply the Google Analytics Report to any account/profile by clicking this link: http://bit.ly/hrdreport . If you have an ecommerce site, this version contains revenue/transaction/conversion metrics: http://bit.ly/hrdecommerce

19 Replies to “Google Analytics – Hours & Days Report”

  1. Pulll the data out into Excel and you can make awesome heatmaps of the data – its also fun to segment the various sources / and other metrics to see if they change, mobile vs tablet vs desktop is a cool one! I love time of day analysis but haven’t quite figured out what to do to make it “actionable” yet, except demonstrating that Tablets aren’t really very mobile at the mo …

    1. Gerry — thats exactly what I want to do — create Heatmaps similar to the ones they show in the Google Analytics mobile app. How do I create this in Excel? Do you have a quick link you can point me to? Thanks so much in advance for your help with this!!

      ~Kelly
      ZippyApp

  2. I have the same question as a poster above. It doesn’t say which day of the week corresponds to which number…Is it 0=Sunday, 1=Monday?? That comment wasn’t answered.

    1. hi, Spencer, I’d responded directly by email – should have remembered to post here.

      Yes, ‘0’ = sunday. If you ever forget, the easy way to double check is simply to limit the date range to a single day.

      Thanks!

      dan

  3. Hi Dan,
    Great tool, cheers for sharing.
    Just wanted to check if the times shown in this tool will be aligned with my current Google Analytics settings (i.e. GMT) or if they’re set to a particular timezone.
    Thanks,
    Alex

  4. How transactions are counted by hour?
    If I see the report with transactions bu hour I have more transactions than I have for this day in total. Is it possible that transaction may be counted twice if it were made during the visit since 10.30 till 11.30?

  5. Thanks Dan for doing the work for me, just a shame I don’t know an easier way to export lots of trend data. I will be using the information to demonstrate how flexible working is changing the way people work. I expect to see more people logging in over the weekend and outisde core hours.

  6. Hi, I recently discovered that my GA account was set to the wrong time zone. I’m in London, England, and it was set to Pacific Time.
    Even though I’ve now changed to the correct time zone, I still think my graphs are still referring to times in the Pacific Time Zone. They didn’t change shape or otherwise ‘shift’ after I changed the time zone.
    Please advise 🙂

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