Understanding time intervals for analytics

One of the settings you can configure for accumulating analytics is the time interval.

• Past Days, Past Hours, Past Months, and Past Years—Use one of these options to accumulate analytics over a unit of time that you specify.
• Set Day, Set Month, Set Week, and Past Years—Use one of these options to accumulate analytics for a specific unit of time.

Referring to the previous illustration, Brightspot accumulates analytics for the past 30 days using a clock in the eastern United States (UTC − 4 or 5 hours, depending on daylight savings or standard time).

Latest and earliest times in a reporting period

Brightspot applies the following logic to determine the latest and earliest times in a reporting period:

1. Capture the current time.
2. Compute the latest time in the interval by rounding down the current time to the requested unit.
3. Compute the earliest time in the interval by subtracting the number of units (less one) from the latest time.

The following table provides examples for determining the reporting period for hours, days, months, and years.

The following diagram illustrates the reporting interval for a seven-day report. The request was made during the day, and Brightspot accumulates data starting from the previous complete day for a total of seven days.

Adjusting for time zones in reporting periods

The times in the previous table are server times—the time on the Brightspot server. If your Brightspot server is in New York, then the server’s clock is most likely running on Eastern Standard Time or Eastern Daylight Time. (You can determine your server’s time zone by clicking menu > Sites & Settings > Global > Front-End > Time Zone.)

Suppose one of your sites addresses a market in London (Western European Time) and your Brightspot server is in New York (Eastern Standard Time). In this scenario, Brightspot accumulates the analytics after adjusting the counts for the five-hour difference.

In the previous illustration, Brightspot adjusts the intervals forward by five hours (using the purple intervals), and then accumulates the analytics.