• Pure Visibility , Thursday, February 19, 2009 3:18 PM

Cyclical Web traffic can have a major impact on trend comparisons across months of data, according to Daniel O'Neil, who provides an example from a Pure Visibility client. He emphasizes that "even with the introduction of advanced segmentation, motion charts, and other awesome features there are real-time traffic patterns that can create major errors in your analytics reporting if you don't account for them."

Through graphs and charts, O'Neil compares traffic pattern and suggests week-to-week rather than month-to-month comparisons. The calendar function in Google Analytics makes this much easier to explain to clients, and you should see a dramatic shift. "Either they will accept the fact that month-to-month reporting may be inaccurate, but not hold you accountable for trend data at that time period, or they will embrace the week-to-week synchronization," he writes.

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