How to View the Time of Visit in Google Analytics? This is one of the common questions that is asked in web analytics, even though the answer is quite simple. There are many other free as well as paid analytics tool which are capable of providing the time of a particular visit. This has lead to many people asking whether we can get the time of the visits to our website. Yes, Google analytics provide the option to see the time of visits to some extent, which gives you an idea of the number of visit in a particular time. But Google does not give a detailed time report of the visit such as the exact hour and minute of any visit. It can show you the number of visit in a particular time frame.
Viewing the Time of Visit in Google Analytics is really simple but is rarely explored by common man. First you need to open your Google analytics account of your particular website and initially you would be on the dashboard of your analytics account. To see the time for your visits click on the “Visitors” option in the main dashboard and you can see a list of sub links such as Overview, Benchmarking, Map Overlay, New Vs Returning, Language etc under this. Now Click on the link “Visitor Trending” under the “Visitors” option and again you can see a list of sub links such as Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, Bounce Rate etc. From these options, click on the link “Visit” and you can see the total number of visits to your website on each day. By default it shows up for the last 30 days and you can see the total number of visits in the regular chart format as well as a bar format under the regular chart. This bar diagram also shows the number of visits on a particular day along with the overall percentage. You will not feel anything new in this as you always come across this section while drilling through your analytics account.
In the regular graphical chart for the visit per each day, you can see 4 buttons on the top right of the chart below the date range section. The names of these 4 buttons are Hour, Day, Week and Month respectively. You can see the names while you move your mouse over these buttons. Now click on the button named Hour which has a logo resembling a clock. After clicking on this button you can see the hour wise distribution of visits. With this you cannot know the exact time of the visit, but you can get an idea of how much visits your website got during a particular hour. Such an information is really helpful while studying the website behavior. It would be much better if Google is able to provide the minute wise distribution of visits. Hope that Google Analytics would provide more precise data on the time of the visits in the near future.
Really helpful post, thank you!