If you read my post about Soft vs Hard Bounces you may have noticed that I was trending single page visits. Typically, when you are trending a metric “sans dimension” (just on its own and not broken down against specific line items in a report) you can look to the trusty Site Metrics menu for most metrics.
However, some metrics (Single Page Visits, Average Time Spent, Click-throughs, Custom Link Views, etc.) are not included here.
To trend these metrics you can simply navigate in the left-hand menu to Site Metrics > Calculated Metrics > Manage Calculated Metrics. From here, choose to define a new metric and notice that the missing metrics I mentioned earlier are in the list of Standard Metrics. All you need to do is simply create a new metric that is equal to the metric you want. When doing this I like to apply some sort of special character in the name of my metric (in this case I’m using brackets) so that I can easily distinguish the new metric from the original.
Once you have saved this metric it will be available under Site Metrics>Calculated Metrics and you can then trend to your heart’s content.
Note: you can also use this same approach to trend, in SiteCatalyst, the standard Product View event which is typically only available within a products report and not as a stand-alone trend.