Bookmarkable Google Analytics today view

Nov 10, 2017 using tags lifehack

If you, like me, use Google Analytics and are annoyed at the extra clicks it takes to change the date range to today, this little tip might make your life slightly easier!

I have Analytics accounts for multiple websites and changing the date range on each of them to today can understandably get tedious. For a high-level overview, I’m a fan of the Behavior -> Overview report. My URL for that report is:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#report/content-overview/a70495014w107707250p112201163/

Note that a70495014w107707250p112201163 here, as far as I am aware, is unique to me. Yours will be different. I’ll refer to this value as the report-property-id.

When you change the date range to today, you will notice that it appends a form of today’s date to the URL. Something like:

%3F_u.date00%3D20171110%26_u.date01%3D20171110/

Since there is no other way of bookmarking the ‘today’ view, this feels like a good candidate to turn into a bookmarklet. Create a bookmarklet in your browser with the following contents, replacing report-property-id with your unique value:

javascript:(function(){function d(a){a=String(a);a.length<2&&(a="0"+a);return a}var c=new Date,b="";b+=c.getFullYear();b+=d(c.getMonth()+1);b+=d(c.getDate());location.href="https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#report/content-overview/<report-property-id>/?_u.date00="+b+"&_u.date01="+b})();

And that’s it. You should now be able to jump to the Behavior -> Overview -> today view whenever you click on the bookmarklet! You can use this technique to turn any Google Analytics report/view into a today bookmarklet.