It’s easy to find visits by day, month or year to your website in Google Analytics.

But sometimes it can be useful to find out at what time of day people are visiting and using your site. Especially if you need to take the site offline for any reason.

Here’s how to find out visits by hour using Google Analytics’ Custom Reporting.

1. Login to your dashboard and choose Custom Reporting in the left-hand menu.

2. Then choose Create a new custom report.

3. Under Metrics, open the Site Usage drop down menu and drag the Visits panel into the first metric tab.

4. Then under Dimensions, open the Visitors drop-down and drag the Hour of the day panel into the dimension box.

Then just give your report a title if you want to, and then Create.

Now, you can go into your report under Custom Reporting in the left-hand menu, choose a date range and view visits by time of day.

Just remember…

If you need to take your site offline, remember that this custom report will usually only cover human visitors to your website, not search engine robots.

If you do need to take your site offline, remember that search robots won’t be able to access your pages while it’s offline. If your site is offline a  lot, it can seriously affect your SEO efforts.