Current block of time (almost) always shows downward trend

Support & Bugs
1

Hi, folks. While I find Piwik quite enlightening, useful, and comprehensive, I am puzzled by one thing: The current block of time (be it week, month, year) almost always shows a downward trend, both in the sparklines and in the stock-market-style up-or-down evolution percentages.

At first I thought there was something wrong, but now I realise it’s because Piwik bases its trends on distinct blocks, rather than a sliding window of time. So if the current block (in the case of the screenshot, 01 April 2011 to 30 April 2011) is only half finished, of course it’s going to show a downward trend, because today is the 14th and there’s still 16 days left in which to gather data!

This strikes me as confusing; my clients who log in might find it odd that their sites seem to be suffering dramatic losses in traffic – especially when they see big red percentages with down arrows beside them.

Is there any way to get Piwik to calculate trends based on the previous 30 days (or 7 days, or 365 days, or whatever) from today’s date instead, so we get a more accurate representation of traffic changes? Is there a bug filed for this yet?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer,
Paul d’Aoust

2

Right. No sliding window.

There’s a third-party plugin for Forecasting. Perhaps that’ll help? Visitor Forecast · Issue #675 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub

3

Thanks for the reply! It’s an interesting plugin, but not quite what I’m curious about: I’m more interested in what’s been going on in the past week/month, rather than seeing red down arrows all over the place (which give the illusion that traffic is dropping, which it often isn’t). So there’s nothing like that out there, eh? (Actually, it seems that something like this is coming in 1.3, if I’m reading the discussions properly.)

4

in 1.3 you can select “Last 7 days” or “Previous 7 days” to load by default, instead of current week (you could also select “Last week”). However Previous 7 days will not compare VS the previous “previous 7 days”, it will just show the previous 7 days on the graph.

5

Ah, okay, so if I understand you correctly, it still won’t tell you about the increase or decrease?