Reports & Widgets Beyond Time Frame

Hey there,

I’d like to suggest a feature that is currently missing not only in Piwik but also in Google Analytics, but would make the life of every website owner a lot easier: reports and widgets beyond the given time frame.

The entire Piwik (and Google Analytics) system relies on the time frame that has been selected by the user. While this is very consistent and necessary for most functions, the downside of this is that some data is deeply hidden. I am talking about very important metrics like yearly, monthly, weekly and daily visitors and pageviews. Currently you cannot view how the website did this week, last week, and the weeks before on one single dashboard page. The same applies to days, months and years. You can of course get to these metrics, but you will have to change the time frame every time.

That is why we need reports and especially widgets beyond the time frame. There should be a couple of widgets that simply don’t care about what time frame you have chosen. This could be the reports and metrics I talked about above, but also something like “total visitors, pageviews, etc. (of all time)” or usage metrics like “how long does a user stay on a single page?”, “how many pages does the average user visit?”, etc.

The German company “etracker” offers these metrics within their analytics software, and that’s pretty much the only thing that attracts me to it currently. In my opinion the above mentioned metrics offer the most important data to most website owners. It would be too bad if this data were hidden behind a time frame.

(Of course it would make sense to also add report pages that display for example the visits and pageviews of all years, all months, all days, and so on.)

Please refer to the attached image for a more visual explanation.

Thanks for the feature request! I see the value in reporting several periods stats at once. Maybe we can add this feature to Piwik.
Would it work for you if:

  1. we made the “Visits over time” widget, allowed to display as a table
  2. and we add a new setting/buttons on this widget, to see the data by Week/month/year (if current period is day)

Then by clicking on this icon to change the period, you could see any metric for any period. Would that work?

if it would work then please create feature request on our issue tracker http://dev.piwik.org/

Hello matt,

first of all, thanks for adressing my suggestion so quickly. So many software companies / developers offer suggestion boards, but the topics and ideas there get hardly noticed.

I like your idea of creating a visits over time widget, that can behave independently of the time frame. I also like the idea of an icon to choose to see the data by day/week/month/year. That would solve my problem very well and will probably come in handy for a lot of users, I suppose.

If you wanna make this idea perfect – but this is really optional as I like your idea very much as it is right now – let the user add multiple instances of this same widget on one dashboard (while saving the view he has chosen for each particular one). So, for example, if you’re like me you would really like to see all the stats at one sight, so you would add the widget 4 times to the dashboard: the daily, the weekly, the monthly and the yearly view. But if you don’t care so much about that, you could just add it once and click the icon every time you wanna see a different horizon.

But, as I said, this is just the extra mile. Would be great to have, but also one instance of the widget you described would solve the problem as well. Please let me know if I shall add my modification to your idea when I create a request on the issue tracker.

Thanks a lot,

Alexander

Hi Alexander,

Ok sounds good! I like this idea a lot.
By default Piwik will let you add widget multiple times already.
And then we store the settings that were clicked in the widget, so as long as we save + restore this particular icon, we will be good.

Do you mind creating a ticket in our issue tracker with your feature request? you may put it in the “2.x backlog” milestone.

Done: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/5202

Done: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/5202