When it comes to All Things Online Marketing, we strive to make them as simple, straight-forward, and practical as possible. We work with small businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent professionals, and being small business owners ourselves, we know that there are only so many hours in a day!

Google Analytics is one of the most intimidating online marketing tools out there. For starters, stats tend to scare people. Next, Google Analytics is considered the most accurate, in-depth tool there is. You could spend all day, every day, looking at the data every which way.

We try to guide our clients towards the essential stuff they really need to focus on within their analytics. We usually toss in a few fun reports to check, too. This post is a ‘quick and dirty’ on how to compare 2 different time periods of your analytics in order to see if some major change you recently implemented, has had a positive (or negative) impact of your website traffic.

Some examples of when this traffic comparison comes in handy:

• You recently implemented SEO on some or all of your website pages.
• You recently began utilizing social media for your business
• You recently implemented an email marketing program
• You recently began blogging for your business

How to Compare 2 Date Ranges in Google Analytics

After signing in to your Google Analytics account, click on the date range shown in the top right corner.

Next, click on the “Compare to” box. You can choose from one of the preset time periods, or customize your time frame.

After choosing your second date range, click apply.

Now you can click through all sections of your Google Analytics dashboard to see data from both date ranges.

Hover over any of the graph points or bar charts to reveal the specific data comparison. In the example below, you’ll see that the previous period included 862 sessions, whereas the current data period recorded 1,449 sessions.

In the example above, this business had recently implemented SEO work on some of their website pages. The difference in organic search numbers (along with the big increase in total visits) lets them know that their SEO efforts are already paying off.