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Is there a way to change the default date range of 31 days in GA? After changing it and clicking apply, only the current report changes? Next time I use GA, 31 days again???

Google analyitics date custom report date range

Google analyitics date custom report date range drop down

Here is documentation on GA date range.

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Google Analytics does NOT support changing the default date range. Some people have noticed that if you bookmark a specific set of dates, those dates end up in the url. Unfortunately, if you create a bookmark with a specific set of dates, those dates will be static and not change. You will never see new data.

However you can create a javascript bookmark (bookmarklet) that dynamically calculates the dates that should be in the url and sends you to the url. I have found three examples of this done for Google Analytics for this purpose.

http://whiletruecode.com/post/change-the-default-google-analytics-date-range-with-a-bookmarklet

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7509010/bookmark-with-date-in-the-url

http://ratafia.info/post/70509179/bookmarklet-to-show-todays-stats-in-google-analytics

EDIT: Some of the above links are out of date (Google changed the URL format of dates in Analytics URLs at some point). I created a page that can on my site that can be bookmarked with your Google Analytics report id to get a wide variety of links for various time periods: http://ostermiller.org/calc/ga.html

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up vote 1 down vote

There's no other way than using a bookmarklet (or browser plugin/extension). I tried the bookmarklet examples above, but none seemed to work for me.

The solution in the first link should work exactly like mine, but for some reason it doesn't. The other 2 links are outdated as Google Analytics URL structure has changed.

The "easiest" way I found to make a bookmarklet works like this:

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account
  2. Look at the URL, it should be something like https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en&#home/a12345678w12345678p12345678/
  3. Copy the last portion of the URL, in the example it's a12345678w12345678p12345678

  4. Open a text editor, copy & paste this code on a new file you can call analytics.html

    <html>
<head></head>
<body><a target="_blank" href="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://www.google.com/analytics/web/?#report/visitors-overview/a12345678w12345678p12345678/%3F_u.date00%3D'+b+'%26_u.date01%3D'+b+'/=';})();">Google Analytics</a>
</body>
</html>

  5. Replace a12345678w12345678p12345678 in the file with the code you copied at step 3

  6. Save the file and open it with your browser (tested with Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac OSX)
  7. Drag the link to your bookmarks bar

Don't delete/move/rename the HTML file if you're using Chrome or Firefox, for some reason they need it even after you've added the bookmarklet.

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In this community, we don't like new users put self-promotion links. If you edit your answer, I remove my downvote ;-). –  Zistoloen Jun 25 at 8:25
 
not that I have ads or anything on my blog... anyway, is this ok now? I was being a little lazy, formatting HTML code in comments/answers is always an adventure :) Should I remove the bottom link as well? –  michele b Jun 25 at 9:01
 
Please provide the most exactly answer to the question (for example by copying some content from your blog) and remove your self promotion link. –  Zistoloen Jun 25 at 9:16
1  
I think it's a little silly to remove the link, but now it's gone. –  michele b Jun 25 at 9:22
 
Downvote removed. –  Zistoloen Jun 25 at 9:30

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