Use Google Analytics to view website traffic by hour
In order to make better business and marketing decisions, you need to understand how well marketing campaigns are working on your website. Once of the ways to do this is to determine when your traffic time periods are high and low. What a lot of businesses don’t know is: You can really fine-tune your website analytics data. You can even view Google Analytics by hour of day.
We accomplish this by adding in Google Analytics custom reporting metrics. Here’s a simple way to add in custom reporting.
Custom Reporting Instructions
- Sign into your Google Analytics account
- In the left navigation, click Customization.
- Click Custom Reports
- Click the Import from Gallery button
- In the popup window’s search box, type in “daily traffic”, hit your enter/return key
- Under the option named Track Visits by Hour of the Day (Hourly), Day of the Week or Date of the Month (Daily), click import
- In the next screen, it will ask you where to import the custom configuration. Click the dropdown menu field and select your Google Analytics view. (By default, they are named All Web Site Data.)
View Google Analytics by Hour
Once you’ve set up this custom reporting template, you can view it:
- Under Customization > Custom Reports, you’ll see the Hourly & Daily Engagement (Hour, Day & Date) option. Click it.
- Your report will default to Hour of Day.
Additionally, you can click between the Day of the Week, Date of Month, and Location of Visitors tabs to view these reports. You can also change the date range as needed.
Get Help with Your Google Analytics
We enjoy using Google Analytics to make smarter web and marketing decisions. We regularly do this for our clients and we’re more than happy to help you too. Please, contact us for help on your website’s Google Analytics.
