In the all websites overview ‘evolution’ is displayed as a percentile. However this seems to be calculated by a whole time period - ie. One Day / One Week / One Month. Whilst this is useful, it’s hard to see how a site is doing when only part way thru a day, a week, a month, etc…
How about the calculation is changed to take into account the current time of day / Day of the week / Day of the month.
Thus instead of a website showing a red -66% at 8 in the morning, because it only has 50 hits compared to the 150 hits it had yesterday, a calculation is made to compensate for the time at that specific point.
For example - 8 in the morning is 8 hours into a 24 hour day, thus it’s 1/3 of a total day. So, the 66% would change to 0% - taking into account that as per the time of day, the site is tracking right on average.
The same calc could be made for day of the week - and day of the month…
Hope this makes sense. I had a look for this suggestion elsewhere but nobody seems to have touched on it as far as i could tell.
Cheers, and thanks to the coders / developers and community for this excellent analytics tool!
Take a look at clicky. They do it the way i’ve described. Personally i find the only way those numbers are useful is if i’m comparing whole periods. Otherwise, looking at today or this week or this month - the data is incomplete and thus the percentile comparison isn’t useable…
+1 for this: data provided by Piwik should be valid and consistent at every time, not only when comparing finished periods with similar finished periods.
The problem by doing a simple ratio of the time of day (ie. at 8AM you only compare to 1/3 of previous day) is that visits are not evenly distributed by hour. So, the % would still be wrong. Ideally we should compare to the number of visits that were before 8AM the previous day…?
I may be confused as to how evolution actually works, it seems the admin user sees all websites in the red but if I log into one of the websites that is currently showing -74% as the admin user, as the general user who has access to this website they are showing +4% evolution.