You Ask, I Answer: Minute Level Data in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Jennifer asks, Do you know how to use Google Data Studio to look at website traffic in a 10 minute window before and after a television commercial time airs? So interesting uh application. I don't know that I would uh use uh date well data studio will work for this. Um yes, there's a way to do that. Google Analytics keeps three different date parameters that keeps uh the year uh the year uh month and day.

That's one parameter, the GA date parameter. It does hour of day and then it does minute. And there's a consolidated text field called GA Date Hour Minute, which you can find in uh in Google Analytics and Google Data Studio that you can then visualize it in some forms uh as as a chart. So let's look at how to do this. I'm gonna switch over here to our application.

So here we are in Google Data Studio. Let's go ahead and make sure obviously that you're you have a data source connected uh that is a Google Analytics account, and just as a general best practice, always slap a little uh date browser there. Now let's go ahead and start with a table. Slap this table in here. And we have page views and we have medium.

So if I start typing date in here, you'll see date uh date and date hour minute. Date hour minute is a field we're looking for. Now one thing you'll notice though is that date hour minute is shows up as a text field. And the reason for this is because it's a large glued together dimension of those other three dimensions, which means that you can't treat it as a date, which is somewhat problematic. Uh you can possibly switch it over here like this.

Ah, there we go, that's better. So now we've converted the data type to date hour minute, and that means that opens up uh the ability for us to look at this at a much more granular level. It also means we can now use things like uh line charts to be able to visualize a little bit better. There's an incredible, incredibly dense chart. So now we've got our page views.

Uh the next thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to uh provide some level of filtering. By the way, if your computer is not up to the task of visualizing that much data because you're talking about tens of thousands of lines, uh make sure that you don't hit chart buttons, you don't mean to. Um so we've got this. The next thing we're gonna want to do is slap some kind of filtering on this uh for the period of time that you're looking for so that your computer again does not attempt to render uh this chart repeatedly and just crash. So if you know the specific time frame that you're looking for, uh specify it as a custom time frame here.

You can see even with a relatively new uh computer, this is uh my browser is struggling to keep up with just the sheer number of uh image of lines on this chart. So let's just go down to seven days. Data stud remix, and now you can get a little more granularity. Once you flip over into view mode, you can then select the date range more uh thoroughly. So let's look at just yesterday.

Was that yesterday? That was two days ago. Um the chart should uh eventually rebuild itself. So that's how you get to this information. Again, if you know that the commercials are going to air only at a very specific time, I would say instead of using date hour minute, you might want to try other date fields.

Uh, if you know that it's always going to be on at a certain hour of the day, you can swap in hour instead. And you can look at the hours of the day. I'll switch that to bar chart here. And there's the hours of the day. And let's change our sort ascending to see what time period periods of time during the day you get people looking at your stuff.

And dimension. And you'll be able to start seeing how many minutes the level of minutes in your in your data. So that would be the way I would suggest tackling this problem. If you know there are specific periods of time, use that. If you have to use the date, hour, minute field, make sure that you convert it as we did to a date format so that you can use it with all these other uh visualizations.

Otherwise, you can only use it in a table, uh, which is not ideal because then you have to apply all sorts of filters and stuff to it. Here's the other thing I would look at. Um you may want to do a more advanced statistical calculation. Uh, and you can't do this in Data Studio, you have to do this in something like uh R or Python or Tableau or something. You may want to look at the correlation between television commercial air times plus the 10 minutes on either side and website traffic to see is there a mathematical relationship, is there a correlation between the airtime and the traffic.

By doing it that way, you can see if there is a a a well, if there is a relationship, if the commercials are doing anything to drive traffic, particularly uh I would be looking at organic traffics from branded organic search or from organic search in general. Because unless your commercial uh has obvious you know calls to action with URLs in them, people are gonna have to search for you by name to remember the brand. Um so that's how I would look at this. Uh that again is outside of the scope of what Data Studio can do, uh, but it is uh it is something that I think is worth doing. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below below.

There is a lot to unpack in Data Studio, so I would definitely take the Data Studio course that's available for free from Google over at uh analytics academy dot with Google.com. It's totally free uh because there's so many different features that you can play with here. Um so give this a shot, have some fun with it. Let me know what you think. Uh as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.