Compare traffic across time periods
Use Umami's Compare and Breakdown insights to understand how your website's traffic is trending week-over-week, month-over-month, or year-over-year.
Compare overall metrics
The Compare insight lets you overlay two time periods to see changes at a glance.
Step 1: Set your date range
Select the date range you want to analyze from the date picker. For example, choose Last 7 days to see the current week.
Step 2: Open the Compare insight
Navigate to your website and open the Compare insight. Choose a comparison period:
- Previous period: Compares against the same length of time immediately before your selected range. If you selected the last 7 days, this compares against the 7 days before that.
- Previous year: Compares against the same dates one year ago. Useful for spotting seasonal trends.
Step 3: Read the results
The Compare view shows:
- Metric cards with percentage changes. Green arrows indicate growth, red arrows indicate decline.
- Overlaid graph with Views (purple) and Visitors (pink) from the previous period alongside current data.
Break down trends by dimension
The Breakdown insight lets you segment your data to find what is driving a change.
For example, if Compare shows a 30% increase in visitors, use Breakdown to find out where they came from:
- Open the Breakdown insight.
- Select Referrer as the field.
- Run the insight to see which referral sources grew or shrank.
Other useful breakdowns when investigating traffic changes:
| Field | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Referrer | Where is the traffic coming from? |
| Country | Which regions are growing? |
| Browser | Are mobile users increasing? |
| Path | Which pages are attracting more visitors? |
| UTM Source | Which campaigns are working? |
Practical examples
Track a product launch: Set the date range to the launch week and compare against the previous week. Break down by Referrer to see if press coverage or social media drove the spike.
Monitor SEO progress: Compare the last 30 days against the previous 30 days. Break down by Path to see which pages are gaining organic traffic.
Evaluate a marketing campaign: Set the date range to the campaign period and compare against the same period before the campaign started. Break down by UTM Source to isolate campaign traffic.