Blind Five Year Old

Sometimes you want to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. Whether you’re obsessive, impatient, troubleshooting or benchmarking, you might find yourself frustrated with the 3-4 hour time lag, particularly if it’s a site with a decent amount of traffic.

Stop Waiting for Google Analytics Traffic

Here’s a quick and easy tip to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. (Remember, this only works if you’re looking at intraday traffic.)

Go to the Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits report in Google Analytics. Then make sure you’re looking at the graph by hour. The report will look something like this.

Now, in the far right select the Advanced Segments drop down and choose one of the default segments. My favorite is Non-paid Search Traffic. Then deselect All Visits so only Non-paid Search Traffic is checked. The result? You get a peek at a few more hours of traffic.

You can leave All Visits on to see the difference between the two if you’re really interested. For me, it’s all about looking at the day’s traffic in comparison to the same day last week. Using the same report with All Visits you get something like this.

Look at just Non-paid Search Traffic and you get to see those most recent hours. This is the report if you’re serious about SEO.

You can use any of the default advanced segments and can usually use any custom advanced segment that produces enough traffic. So stop refreshing your dashboard stats again and again without success. Instead, follows these few steps and get ahead of the curve.

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