Google Analytics - Visitor Trending

The next set of reports in Google Analytics is the Visitor Trending section. This is a fairly straightforward set of reports, but useful nonetheless (these reports remind me of Webalizer somewhat). Basically, this is a visual representation of your visitor trends over time - by day or by hour. You can obtain the following trend reports:

• Visits
• Absolute Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• Average Pageviews
• Time On Site
• Bounce Rate

The default "Daily" report looks like this:

The "Hourly" trending report looks like this:

So essentially, you see a bar chart breakdown of the line graph at the top. Above the bar charts you see either a total or average data value for the chosen metric (total visitors, average time on site, etc). Perhaps not the most insightful reports, but they can still certainly be useful.

With daily Visitors for example, you can look back at specific days and see if there was any significant traffic increase on the days that you ran a certain promotion. Or as you can see in the Daily chart above, you can read the trending to see that weekend traffic is substantially lower. This would tell you that it's unwise to plan any specific promotion to occur over a weekend!

Hourly trending can also give you these little tidbits of insight. For example, you can see when your lowest traffic volume occurs, and use that time to perform major upgrades to your website. That way, if something goes wrong it affects the least number of visitors.

Hourly trending can also help you plan your promotions. The computer company Dell often promotes "12 Days of Deals" on their website. Each deal only launches at a set time each day. It would be wisest to choose that time based on your visitor trends, when you're able to create the most business based on the most traffic volume.

Anyhow, these reports are somewhat basic compared to the others, but they're still necessary!