New Google Analytics Date Comparison Feature – WOW

Amazing (WOW didn’t stand for ‘week over week’) - in 2012 Google Analytics finally launched a select box allowing you to compare the selected date range with ‘last year’.

The one drawback is that since most businesses operate on a day-of-week comp, their date range simply doesn’t compare Mondays to Mondays, Tuesdays to Tuesdays, etc..For example, 8/28/12 is comp’d against 8/30/11.

We actually did a study of several online retailers Google Analytics visits trended year over year, comparing the correlation between the day of week relationship vs the numerical one. The correlation coefficients were .9x for day of week and flat or negative for the numeric date comparison.

What business actually compares the numerical date year over year? I can’t think of one off the top of my head…

Time out,

Jeff