Google Analytics Blog
When does the Library website get the least traffic?
September 29, 2025
I would like to run some tests on my website, and I would like that test to impact as few users as possible. Although GA4 gives you daily engagement numbers out of the box, you need to go into Explore to create a custom report to look at users-per-hour. The testing takes 24 hours, so I need to find a lower-traffic 24 hour block. To do that I improvised on the tutorial on How to View GA4 Hourly Traffic Report. Rather than use all the standard traffic metrics, I opted to focus just on Total Users (which includes Active Users and New Users), and I only measured for two weeks, because GA4 puts a limit on how much data you can view.
The easiest way to view the result was to download a PDF - Hourly Traffic, Two Weeks. The numbers in the first column are date/hour formatted as YYYYMMDDHH (that's 24-hour military time). The two weeks, starting on at 12:00am Friday, show not quite the same pattern, but you can see that traffic drops off off sharply after 12:00am Saturday, and stays relatively low (below 90 users) through Saturday, till it starts tracking up slightly higher on Sunday. Tuesday 10:00am seems to be peak time in both weeks.
Previous Analytics Explorations
August 29, 2025
The CSUN campus move to Drupal 10 brought with in a big, bold design with lots of images, videos, whitespace, large fonts, and VERY long pages. We lost our "homepage banner" advertising space to a "hero image" and most of our featured content now falls "below the fold" -- that is, users need to scroll down past the initial screen-height to find it. Are they?
Using Google Analytics,in combination with Google Tag Manager, we are able to measure "scroll depth": how far users scroll into a page. I followed the tutorial How to see Scroll Depth in Google Analytics 4? from AnalyticsMania and was able to set up a custom GA4 view. It shows how many times people scrolled to depths of 25%, 50%, and 75% of the top 25 pages on the website between August 26rd and August 28, 2025. Here is an excerpt.
| Page URL | Percent scrolled | Event count | Total users |
|---|---|---|---|
| https://library.csun.edu | 25 | 2239 | 1455 |
| 50 | 375 | 331 | |
| 75 | 202 | 180 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/technology/dlp | 25 | 1061 | 803 |
| 50 | 561 | 490 | |
| 75 | 370 | 335 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/research-assistance/lib290 | 25 | 582 | 519 |
| 50 | 467 | 434 | |
| 75 | 343 | 319 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/services/study-rooms | 25 | 586 | 442 |
| 50 | 332 | 291 | |
| 75 | 238 | 218 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/hours | 25 | 532 | 439 |
| 50 | 404 | 349 | |
| 75 | 157 | 147 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/technology/printing | 25 | 278 | 234 |
| 50 | 183 | 166 | |
| 75 | 105 | 98 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/services/borrow-renew-return | 25 | 235 | 180 |
| 50 | 215 | 170 | |
| 75 | 73 | 69 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/services/library-for-students | 25 | 273 | 223 |
| 50 | 119 | 108 | |
| 75 | 64 | 60 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/collections/scholarworks | 25 | 138 | 123 |
| 50 | 108 | 101 | |
| 75 | 89 | 83 | |
| https://library.csun.edu/about/building-floor-maps | 25 | 177 | 145 |
| 50 | 116 | 105 | |
| 75 | 31 | 31 |
Where are you when you've scrolled 50% down a page? That depends on the size of your screen, your viewport. Here's a comparison of what users see on phone and desktop when scrolling to different depths on the University Library Homepage:
| Depth | Desktop | Mobile |
| 25% |  |  |
| 50% |  |  |
| 75% |  |  |
These views were derived using Google Tag Manager in preview mode, which allows you to see the tags fire in real-time. The phone experience was approximated using Firefox DevTools.