For all of the reporting power that Google Analytics provides, occasionally I want to see data in a way it doesn’t natively support. Most recently, I was interested in understanding hourly and daily shifts in traffic across sections of a site. Knowing when these occur could help authors time their publishing schedules for maximum exposure.
Here’s what I was looking for – a heatmap that boils a few month's worth of data into a weekly view. As you can tell from this example, traffic tracks closely to normal working hours.
My first thought was to pull the data in CSV form from GA, hack it up in Google Spreadsheets or Refine, and then chart it out. But I soon found that I couldn’t find a way to reproduce this chart using their stock widgets. I looked at D3 and a few other charting frameworks and, though I was impressed, I wasn’t ready to commit to that learning curve. Plus, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time pulling data exports from GA if I could help it.
Looking further afield, I remembered R.
