Using Google Analytics To Track Hourly Statistics

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Almost one month ago Google Analytics announced that hourly tracking was possible. This is a huge move, especially for TV advertisers.

Let’s say that you have a new TV ad campaign starting next week. You target your advertising to three separate geographical areas, but you decide to run the same TV commercial in all areas and at different times of the day. Hourly tracking allows you to see which ad is most effective. If you see any traffic spikes directly after your ad runs in any of those three markets then you can know whether those TV ads are working or not.

I think it would be nice to have this tool for tracking radio ads and normal web traffic as well. There may be times when I want to see if a particular website gets more traffic in the morning or in the evening, whether I’m advertising that site on TV or not.

Still, for TV advertisers this is a great tool to work with because TV ads are known to run at specific times and you can see when they run. Therefore, you can tell if the ad is effective or not judging by spikes in your website traffic. That’s a real historic move for advertising and could lead to some real innovation in integrated marketing strategies.