So, you’re watching your website’s stats like a hawk. You visit Google Analytics page every day (I hope not every few hours!) to check how the day went. The annoying thing is that you always have to tell Google Analytics to show you the stats for the day and not for the entire month.
In this post, I will show you a quick and easy way to open Google Analytics page directly to the day view rather than the month view.
There are a couple of ways to open Google Analytics. Some webmasters, who have multiple websites, like to access the overview page at:
https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/home
On that page you get a snapshot of the activity on all of your websites. From there, you can click “View report” to open the report for the specific website.
Other webmasters like to open the website report view directly.
I personally use the overview page, so I have bookmarked the link above. But every time I open the URL, it defaults to the month view. To open the page to a certain date view, you have to bookmark a URL like this:
https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/home#dates=20100207-20100207
Notice the difference in this URL? There’s a “dates” range. 20100207 is simply 2010/02/07. I obviously can’t just bookmark this URL because it’ll always open the 7th of Feb ’10 view.
What if it were possible to create a bookmark with a URL that updates itself everyday? Sounds nifty, ha? Well, it turns out to be quite simple. It just needs a little bit of JavaScript code. I put it in this bookmarklet (?):
Google Analytics Day View Bookmarklet
Simply drag the link above to your bookmarks toolbar/folder, and whenever you want to open Google Analytics, you simply click on it. The bookmarklet will automatically set the “dates” range to yesterday (since Google Analytics is 24 hours late). It will open the overview page with the date set to yesterdays, and from there you can click on View report and it’ll open the report for yesterday (not the month)!
Note: you have to be logged in to your Google account for this to work.
That’s it. You’re done.
If you want me to create another bookmarklet to open the report view directly at single day view, post your request in the comments.
And as always, if you have a question, comment, or suggestion, I’d love to hear them!
Enjoy!