When we walk clients and partners through Google Analytics, one of the most frequently asked questions is, “Can I break my traffic down by time of day?”  Yes you can, and here’s how:

1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Select “View report” next to your domain name
3. Select “Visitors” from the navigation in the top left corner
4. Click “Visitor Trending” and then select “Time on Site”
5. Below the date range in the top right corner, you’ll see a line that says, “Graph by:” with four icons next to it. These icons represent hour / day / week / month.
   Select the first icon (a clock) and it will break down your traffic for that date range by time of day. If you want to see the time of day for a specific day, just change both fields of the date range to the same day.

One interesting note about how Google Analytics tracks traffic by time is that each session expires at the end of the day.  What this means is that visitors beginning their session before midnight and carrying over into the next day will be split into two visits.  So, websites that are heavily trafficked late at night and into the early morning might see a higher number of visits, but less time spent per visit, as their traffic gets divided by the new day. [source]

Troubleshooting:  There’s not a lot that can go wrong with tracking visitors by time of day, as long as the time zone in the account is correct. By default, all accounts in the U.S. are set to Pacific Time. If your Analytics account is not linked to an AdWords account, you’ll be able to set your time zone preference from the Profile Settings page. If your Analytics account is linked to a Google AdWords account, your time zone is set to your AdWords preference, and can only be managed through that account.