A thing I’d like to see in Google Analytics
Now, I’m no professional analytics guy. I’ve lightly used Google Analytics, used several log analysis packages, even wrote the log analysis software that the NYTimes used for the first few years of its life - but I’ve never been a hardcore consumer of said analysis. Having said that, now that I’ve been playing around with GA (and generally loving it) I’ve found a pretty basic issue that I find strangely lacking.
The beta, which is annoyingly even further behind real time than the original interface (which I still mostly use) fixes a bunch of problems. The biggest one is that you can now segment by “Landing Page” so you can see where people are actually heading to on the site with a good level of granularity.
However the beta has actually removed functionality that I so loved, that is it removed the hourly view of a days traffic. In the original interface if you were looking at a single day then you saw your traffic by hour - sadly in the beta it never shows you a chart of less than 30 days.
Even beyond that, GA has always lacked cyclical, aggregate graphs. That is, I’d like to see an hourly graph of all the aggregate traffic in any given range. That is total or average traffic per each hour over my chosen date range. This is really useful to see exactly when the bulk of your traffic is coming to your site. Are they lunch readers? Getting ready to leave work readers? Or maybe they’re first thing at work readers. Right now it’s difficult to tell in the original interface and impossible in beta.
It would also be useful to have this cyclical, aggregate view by day of the week over your given range. This would help you see which days are you big ones. You can kind of get this in beta because the long range view has weekly division, but it would be much easier to see all this data averaged together.
Almost every log analysis package I’ve used has shown me those graphs - I don’t think this is advanced information, so I’m curious as to why it isn’t present in GA. It’s by no means a deal killer, but it’d sure be nice to get those graphs. Anything you guys find missing in GA?
