Timeline previous period - quickly compare interest over time

The Timeline widget can now quickly show you whether public or media interest is up or down compared to the previous period of your selected time range. 

What are the benefits?

The timeline previous period allows you to assess changes of interest at a glance saving you time answering the important questions. This allows you to view the hour by hour and day by day graphs of real-time public and media interest in any topic and quickly compare them to the previous period.

The addition of this visualization means that you can save time when you need to contextualize whether a topic is increasing or decreasing in popularity since the previous period such as yesterday, or last week.

How to use timeline previous period

Each graph on your timeline widget has a dotted line that represents the previous period. The widget will also show you the exact percentage increase or decrease in public and media interest since this previous period. This period is determined by your widget's selected date ranges. This could be 24 hours like the default monitoring dashboard, 1 week like the default research dashboard, or to whichever custom date range you have selected.

Notes and best practices

The previous period date range selections do have some variations to be noted. If you select 24 hours, 1 week, or 1 month then it will compare directly to the previous day, week, or month.

However, if you select 3 hours, 6 hours, or 12 hours then the previous period will compare the graphs to the same 3 hours the day before. If you select 3 days then the previous period is the same 3 days from the previous week and not the 3 days preceding the current date.

For example, if 3 days is selected and it's Tuesday 26th, the graph will show data from Saturday 23rd and the previous period will be from Saturday 16th. This allows the comparison of data to be more relevant and accurate to account for seasonal fluctuations.

The previous period data is not available on the combined timelines widget to allow for clear comparisons of unique searches.

The feature is enabled by default except for custom and since ranges. It can be toggled on or off. The previous period is included in Powerpoint, Excel, and Image exports unless the user has toggled it off.