The date picker in the dashboard header sets the period, and every figure, chart and list on the page is measured over it. It opens on the last 30 days.
Change it once and the whole dashboard follows, including the tabs you have not opened yet.
Picking a period
The picker is a row of five: 7d, 30d, 90d, 12M and Range. The first four are one click and cover almost every question you will ask. Range opens a calendar for a start and an end date, for the times they do not. The range is inclusive: pick the 1st to the 31st and you get all 31 days.
On a wide screen the header spells the range out next to the picker, first day to last, so you never have to work out which dates 30d stands for.
The dashboard opens on 30d and remembers what you last picked, so the tab you come back to shows the period you left it on.
You cannot go back further than the day your account was created, and you cannot go past today. Both ends of the picker stop there, so an accidental drag into empty time is not possible.
The period before
Every range quietly brings a second one with it: the same number of days, placed immediately before the range you picked. Choose 30 days and the comparison is the 30 days before that. Choose a single day and it is the day before.
This is what the trend arrows on the key figures measure. Up means more than the period before, down means less.
The comparison always sits directly before your range. It is never the same month last year, so a seasonal business should compare periods deliberately rather than trusting the arrow.
Showing the comparison on a chart
The last segment of the date picker, a dashed line, shows the previous period. It is one switch for the whole page: turn it on and every chart that supports it draws the period before over the current one as a dashed line. Hovering the segment names the dates it covers, and on a tab without such a chart it is greyed out and says so.
It starts off. A dashboard shows one line until you ask for two, and the second line stays on until you turn it off again.
The charts for members, revenue, commissions and website traffic all support it. It is the quickest way to see whether a good week was actually good or just looked that way.
On a phone the header has no room for the segment. There the date menu carries it as its last entry, Show previous period, and it does the same thing.
Reading a range honestly
A few habits keep the numbers meaningful.
- Prefer whole weeks. The comparison is always as long as your range, so a range of whole weeks lands on a period with exactly the same number of weekends. The 30-day default only lands on one sometimes.
- Mind the running period. A range that ends today is incomplete, and the comparison against a full period before it will always look weak.
- Totals and snapshots differ. New members counts what happened inside the range. Total members is the count as of the end of it. Widening the range raises the first and barely moves the second.
What the range does not change
Two things stay put. Which tabs exist depends on the features you have switched on, not on dates. And your card arrangement is yours permanently, whatever period you are looking at.
Where to go next
The date picker sets the period behind every number. Which cards show those numbers, and in what order, is yours to change.