Google Analytics shows you quite a lot of things about your traffic in its standard reports – what sources and locations visitors are coming from, what pages they land on, how long they stay, do they convert, etc. But there’s no standard report to show the time people are entering the website. You can only see a graph by hour in the Audence Overview report if you select the Hourly tab and a shorter time range to avoid sampling.

There are Hour and Minute dimensions in GA that we can use to apply to any report. Let’s see at what hour most people are coming to our site by traffic channels: go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels report and apply secondary dimension hour.

In a similar way we can select the Minutes dimension. However, it doesn’t make much sense to use just minutes without the hours, and standard reports in GA can have up to 2 dimensions, so let’s build a custom report. We’ll have 3 dimensions and 2 metrics to keep it simple:

Now you can see the specific time of day when people entered your site – an easy way to discover how your links shared on social media or press release announcements are affecting traffic.

Margarita Evtimova

Margarita Evtimova is a Google Analytics fan, who also loves SEO, conversion optimization, online marketing and social media. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.