Welcome back Rajneesh!!! I heard my soul stating this on my return after one year. All this time, I was still learning, waiting for this day when I can again start share more. I hope I may maintain the momentum this time so keep providing your valuable feedback.
First of all, many thanks to my friend Andrew Wathen for providing initial tips to kick-off this second inning.
So, everyone loves trends and so do Discover users. We many times simply hover on the cell we want to trend and click on that tiny image to see the trend which looks like below:
Now clicking on Launch Trend Report button opens another report with all dates in the report range on left and metric values corresponding to the selected cell on right, for the selected dimension value.
What if you need to do some calculations on the basis of trends against multiple metrics? I used to trend individual cells, launch the trended report, copy data and paste it in a spreadsheet program like Excel and then do necessary calculations. This can take good amount of time if you have many cells to do calculations on.
A really simple tip (not sure how I missed it, you should not as you just read this article) is pressing Ctrl key and select multiple cells, right click on one of the selected cells and select option Trend Cells (you will note if you are careful that option says Cells, not Cell!). The result is each metric being trended for the selected dimension value. You can also select multiple dimension values which means more number of columns in the new trended report.
Now how this cool feature be useful:
1. Trended comparison view of multiple dimension values. For example, if you want to see Visits and Exits to Homepage and Registration page over a period of time, add these 2 metrics, select both pages in the Pages report and use Trend cells which will contain 4 columns, each for combination of a page and a metric.
2. Most of the Discover users must be facing issues in trending calculated metrics over time because of a Discover defect. As a result of this, your favorite metrics like Bounce rate against a page, when trended, show irrelevant data (if you haven't tried this, give this a go). I haven't found any solution to this defect but a close workaround is to select the metrics used in the calculated metric rather than calculated metric itself and use Trend cells feature to get the data which you can copy and paste in an Excel sheet and then run calculations. Most of the times, you'd just need to apply the formula in top row and drag it to apply on all.
Hope this saves some of your precious time...
First of all, many thanks to my friend Andrew Wathen for providing initial tips to kick-off this second inning.
So, everyone loves trends and so do Discover users. We many times simply hover on the cell we want to trend and click on that tiny image to see the trend which looks like below:
Now clicking on Launch Trend Report button opens another report with all dates in the report range on left and metric values corresponding to the selected cell on right, for the selected dimension value.
What if you need to do some calculations on the basis of trends against multiple metrics? I used to trend individual cells, launch the trended report, copy data and paste it in a spreadsheet program like Excel and then do necessary calculations. This can take good amount of time if you have many cells to do calculations on.
A really simple tip (not sure how I missed it, you should not as you just read this article) is pressing Ctrl key and select multiple cells, right click on one of the selected cells and select option Trend Cells (you will note if you are careful that option says Cells, not Cell!). The result is each metric being trended for the selected dimension value. You can also select multiple dimension values which means more number of columns in the new trended report.
Now how this cool feature be useful:
1. Trended comparison view of multiple dimension values. For example, if you want to see Visits and Exits to Homepage and Registration page over a period of time, add these 2 metrics, select both pages in the Pages report and use Trend cells which will contain 4 columns, each for combination of a page and a metric.
2. Most of the Discover users must be facing issues in trending calculated metrics over time because of a Discover defect. As a result of this, your favorite metrics like Bounce rate against a page, when trended, show irrelevant data (if you haven't tried this, give this a go). I haven't found any solution to this defect but a close workaround is to select the metrics used in the calculated metric rather than calculated metric itself and use Trend cells feature to get the data which you can copy and paste in an Excel sheet and then run calculations. Most of the times, you'd just need to apply the formula in top row and drag it to apply on all.
Hope this saves some of your precious time...
