Are visits up or down?
Are sales up or down?
Is there a change to AOV?
The primary way to answer this is to use a trend report.
However, only 5 items can be trended (another issue)
Enhancement request: When running a ranked report for a particular date range or for a report suite reportlet, have Up/Down/Sideways indicators to add some context to the report to show how the data has changes. Some ranges for context include vs: yesterday, last month, last year.