Google Analytics Visitor Counts by Hour of Day and Day of Week
Good news and bad news. I’m a pessimist realist, so we’ll start with the bad news.
Bad news: Your web team says the site has to go down for maintenance. For several hours in the near future, your company’s presence on the web will be invisible to any potential customer.
Good news: You get to choose when the maintenance occurs, which gives you the opportunity to predict the period of time when it will have the least impact.
The only question is, when is that? Google Analytics won’t tell you… at least, not without a little cajoling.
Here’s how you do it.
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Go to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits.
- Use the date drop-down to select a roughly representative time period. Several weeks or months of steady traffic should do the trick. I like to start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday to ensure a uniform count for each day of the week.
- Next to “Graph By:”, select the Day icon.
- Here’s where it gets tricky. Click Export and select CSV. Open the file in Excel.
- Find a few open cells off the right. For each day of the week, enter a formula of the form ‘=SUMIF(A:A, “Monday*”, B:B)’. This should give you total number of visitors for each day of the week for the time period you entered.
- Go back to Google Analytics. Next to “Graph By:”, select the Hour icon.
- You should now see a sideways bar graph indicating the proportion of visitors who saw the site during each hour of the day. In most cases, this will be roughly bell-curvish, with a trough in the middle of the night and a crest in the middle of the day.
Now all you have to do is choose the day of the week and hour of the day with the least number of visitors. This isn’t perfect, of course; if, for some reason, the hourly averages differ significantly from day to day, the data can be misleading. Major outliers also present problems. For example, if your site hit the front page of Digg one morning last month, it could skew the averages. Thus, it’s best to omit atypical time periods in favor of steady data.
What do you think? Was this post helpful? Do you have follow-up questions? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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This was very helpful, thanks!
Instead of writing =SUMIF(A:A, “Monday*”, B:B), I made a column where C16 was Monday, C17 was Tuesday, etc. Then I could say:
=SUMIF(A:A, CONCATENATE(C16,”*”),B:B )
in the cell next to the word “Monday.” I could copy/paste that formula next to “Tuesday” and it would immediately do the calculation for Tuesday, and so on.
Anyway, great tip!