lucianfialho/gmp-cli/recipe-compare-periods

Compare Periods

PREREQUISITE: Load the following skills to execute this recipe: gmp-ga

Compare traffic metrics between two time periods to identify trends, growth, or drops. ga report does this natively with --compare -- one API call, correct date math, current/previous rows already in the response. Prefer it over running two separate reports and diffing by hand.

Steps

1. This week vs the equal-length prior week:

gmp ga report -p PROPERTY_ID -m sessions,activeUsers,screenPageViews -r 7d --compare previous_period -f table

1. This month (last 30 days) vs the prior 30 days:

gmp ga report -p PROPERTY_ID -m sessions,activeUsers,conversions -r 30d --compare previous_period -f table

1. Year over year, same dates:

gmp ga report -p PROPERTY_ID -m sessions -r 2025-01-01..2025-01-31 --compare previous_year -f table

1. Break a comparison down by dimension (e.g. by channel) -- --compare composes with -d:

gmp ga report -p PROPERTY_ID -m sessions -d sessionDefaultChannelGroup -r 30d --compare previous_period -f table

The output includes an implicit dateRange column (current/previous) distinguishing the two periods -- no need to request it as a dimension.

When to fall back to two separate calls

--compare only supports previous_period (equal-length preceding window) and previous_year (same dates, one year back). For an arbitrary non-adjacent comparison (e.g. this quarter vs a specific quarter two years ago that isn't exactly "previous year"), run two reports with explicit -r start..end ranges and diff the results yourself -- gsc report and the ads reports also have no native compare support and always need this two-call approach.