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Improve time comparison reports

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Level 4

3/10/11

Make it easier to compare time periods. For example, setting up automated (or on demand) week/week, month/month or YTD compared to same period prior year.

Problems with current functionality:

- You can select "Last Week" or "Last Month" but no way to indicate prior week/month. i.e. You have to use the arbitrary date range option which is either fixed (in which case it won't update) or rolling (in which case it will only be correct the same day of the week/month you created it)

- The change column is calculated as {comparison time period} - {current time period} which is backwards. For example, if you had a million visits in March and 200K in February, it would shows the change to be -800K instead of an increase of 800K. (The work around is to reverse the periods, but that's completely non-intuitive and the export file names show the wrong period. i.e. The March 2011 will be labeled February 2011)

- There's no way to show the biggest gainers or losers without exporting and sorting offline. i.e. Can't see Top Gainers/Droppers

Suggested changes:

- Add "Prior week and Prior Month" to date options

- Add "Compare to prior period" and compare to "prior year" options. For example, if the reporting period was last week and you select "Compare to prior period" it would compare it to the week before. If you picked an arbitrary date range (e.g. Feb. 1 - Feb. 15th), it would compare to the same number of days (i.e. Jan 16-31)

Note: If using "This Week/Month/Year", there should ideally be an option to use the same number of days. i.e. If you ran this year on March 10th, 2011 the comparison should be through the same date of the week/month/year. i.e. Compare Jan 1-15, 2011 to either the last 15 days of the year (if comparing to prior period) or to the same date range in 2010 (if comparing to prior year)

- Allow sorting by the ABSOLUTE change to show biggest gainers/losers.

Nice to haves:

- Sorting by largest percent change would be very helpful too, but it should only include the top n items in terms of absolute change. i.e. If the 1000th item on the list increased from 1 to 201 (a 20000% change), that should not show up at the top of the report.

- Ability to specify whether to show/hide the following:

a) The prior prior value

b) The percent change

c) Absolute change.

For example, show only Current Value and % change or Current Value and Absolute change to limit the width of the report or show more metrics.  (Instead of always showing all four values for each metric)

12 Comments

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Level 9

2/2/12

Perhaps you are just talking about v15?

 

In v14, where we still live, there is simply "left" and "right" columns, not "current" and "comparison," and the fomula is just fine, provided you put the earlier time period in the left/first column.

-- Norm

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Employee Advisor

11/16/17

Custom date ranges in Analysis Workspace allow immediate comparisons to any two (or more) date ranges, and can roll as well.