Cool custom report: Daily data within a monthly report period

WebTrends contains a little-known custom report dimension that will show trends within your reporting period.   Yes, you already get this with the trend graphs.  But this gives you a table — one table row per day of the month in a monthly report period.  Or one row per hour of the day in a daily report.   The exported version of this is great for graphing trends with Excel.

Your measures can be any of the usual ones – visits, views … except for Unique Visitors.  (Stay away from that one.  As The Man says, ‘O! that way madness lies.’  With the dimension we’re discussing in this post, WebTrends does show visitor numbers that mean something, but not what you think they mean. Uh, nevermind.  We’ll get into it some day.)

The dimension needs to be created before you can use it in custom reports.  It uses the little-known dimension choice called “Time Period.”  Steps:

1. In the Custom Reports editing area, create a new dimension.  Call it something like “time period” or “time trend”
2. Choose ”Time Period” in the drop-down “Based On” menu

Once you’ve created it, it will appear as a Dimension choice for any custom report.

• Use it as the sole dimension for anything you can filter for: an important page or KPI (URL), a specific content group, a specific browser, a specific campaign
• Use it in 2D reports as the primary dimension with any hit-based secondary dimension:  entry page, browser, etc (but see the cautionary note at the end!)
• If you use it as a secondary dimension, note that it will appear in non-chronological order.  The list will be sorted in highest-to-lowest order for the first measure (but, again, see the cautionary note at the end!)

WebTrends deems this to be a “hit-based” dimension.  It may, therefore, show odd results if you try to pair it with a visit-based secondary dimension.

The Cautionary Note At The End:  Don’t get carried away with this!  It slows down processing AND it creates mighty big internal tables.  A Time Period x URL 2-dimensional table will create a monthly monster that’s 30 or 31 times larger than a plain URL table.   Try to restrain yourself to one dimension, or if you insist on something 2D, put it in a profile where it is the only custom report.

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