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I love Google Analytics.  It’s phenomenal.  It really helps me track how a site is doing and optimize the visitor experience.  However, there’s one thing about it that bugs me to no end.  It defaults to showing you the last full day’s statistics.

Well, I’m a statistics junkie, so that doesn’t make me happy.  I want to see how I’m doing today, as close to real-time as I can.  As far as I can tell there is no setting you can set to make it default to view today by default.  The only way to do that without manually changing the dates is to set the pdr variable in the URL.

So, here’s how to create a bookmark that will take you to today’s statistics (these instructions are for Firefox, but I imagine Safari and IE can’t be too different).

1. Drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar: Today’s Analytics
2. Find out your Analytics ID: You can do this by visiting your dashboard and looking for the id parameter in the URL.
3. Replace XXX in the bookmark with your ID: Right click on the bookmark you created, and go to Properties.  Scroll toward the end of the URL, and find “XXX”.  Replace this with the ID you found.
4. Click the bookmark

You should now be able to use that bookmark to view your Google Analytics with a default end date of today.

If you don’t like any of the other settings, you can change around the URL at the end to suit how you like to do things.

Now you don’t have to always change the date as soon as you log in.  Enjoy!

Well, Wordpress seems to have messed up the link. I’ll fix it as soon as I can…

Questions, comments?  I’d love to hear from you.  Just leave a comment down below!

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