How to Track Rush Hour of the Day Using Google Analytics

Let's start

Google Analytics is a very useful and profitable tool if used wisely and understand how it works. It has many features which are responsible for collecting data from your site, app or any digitally connected device, processes that data and outputs the reports.

Why you need to track time of day?

Sometimes it’s most important to understand google analytics traffic by hour. This way you will be able to see during which hours your site shows the highest traffic. By using google analytics hourly traffic reports you can set your marketing strategy to reach out more traffic.

How to track traffic by hour in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics does not contain a built-in feature that will show traffic according to the hours of the day. There are two methods of doing this in GA, one is to create custom report by yourself and secondly importing custom reports from analytics solution gallery. Here I will show you both methods of doing this:

Create Custom Reports

In order to create a custom report sign into your GA account and select customization tab.

 create custom report

create custom report

Next, enter the title for custom report.

Enter a name for the report tab

Select type as ‘Flat Table’

Dimension as ‘Hour’

Metrics as ‘pageviews’, ‘pages/session’,’Avg.session duration’, and ‘Bounce Rate’ in my case but you can select other metrics according to your need.

And click save.

Your custom report will look something similar to the below screenshot.

 hour of the day

hour of the day

Importing Custom Reports from Analytics Solution Gallery

If you are not comfortable with using google analytics or new to GA the simplest way is to import custom report from solution gallery, where other members have created and posted for your use.

Below are some custom reports for tracking hour of the day, you can import any of it for your use.

  1. Track Visits by Hour of the Day (Hourly), Day of the Week or Date of the Month (Daily)
  2. Metrics by Day of Week Name & Hour
  3. Page views by hour, filtered by page
  4. Hours & Days (detail https://bit.ly/hourdays)

If you have done the things correctly i hope you are getting reports the way you wanted to see.

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