Hourly reports on Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to break down activity on your site by hour, but this function isn’t easy to find in the current version.

I have set up a custom report to do this (custom reporting is available on the left-hand side of your Google Analytics screen).

Custom reports are set up by dragging metrics (blue) from the left of the screen and adding dimensions (green).

I have dragged over Entrances – which counts how many people arrive on the site – and split it down by hours of the day. So, for example, I can see that between 9am and 10am there have been 1015 site entrances during the last month – and there have only been 100 between 1am and 2am.

As usual, I can filter the report by selecting a particular date, or range of dates, at the top of the screen. On 21 June most people arrived in the hour before midday, while only two people arrived 1am-2pm.

My hourly report is set to drill down to ‘Page Title’ (that’s the second green dimension that I dragged on to my custom report. This means I can click on any hour of the day and see where those entrances took place during that hour.

As my focus is on the two-day OU online conference (21-22 June 2010) I can now focus right in and see where people arrived on the site during specific sessions.
What is more, I can then subdivide that information, so I know how many people arriving on a certain page during a certain session are new visitors, or which country they come from.

By the time I have narrowed it to time, date and city where the visitor is based, though, the level of granularity is such that it has ethical implications because I now have a fairly good idea who some of those individual visitors are. I can click through and see who their service provider is (for example ‘open university’, ‘university of leeds’) and what their connection speed is (an online conference on dial-up? – ouch)

Using Google Analytics at this level of granularity seems/is intrusive. That’s a tension for my work on learning analytics – because how can learning analytics work if they don’t split down to individual level? I guess the distinction has to be that I should be in the user’s hands to turn them on and off, and to decide their own privacy levels in different situations.