Comparing periods and trends
Compare any date range against the previous period, the previous year or a custom window, and see where change badges and dashed comparison lines appear.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated On this page
To answer “are things up or down lately, and by how much?”, turn on Compare in the date picker in the top bar. Comparison is one app-wide setting, so every report follows it — there’s no separate trends page to open.
Choosing what to compare against
The Compare setting has four modes:
- Off — reports show the selected dates only.
- Previous period — a window of the same length just before the one you picked.
- Previous year — the same window one year earlier.
- Custom — place the comparison window yourself on the calendar.
Match weekdays (on by default) shifts the comparison window in whole weeks, so Mondays compare to Mondays and a weekend dip in one window doesn’t distort the change. See Report date windows for the exact rules.
Where comparisons show up
- Brand Pulse Overview cards — Revenue, Orders, Conversion Rate, Meta Spend, Google Spend and Net Cash In each get a green or red % change badge and a dashed line for the comparison window, drawn on the same scale so the two are directly comparable.
- Marketing Mix — the totals strip (attributed orders, revenue, ad spend, blended ROAS, blended AOV) shows the change for each.
- Campaign and product tables — a small % change under the headline numbers. A dash (—) means the comparison window had nothing to compare against.
Spend changes are shown in a neutral colour, since spending more isn’t good or bad on its own.
Reading the change well
- Compare like with like. A 7-day window that starts on a Monday against one that starts on a Saturday mixes up weekend effects — leave Match weekdays on.
- Use Previous year for seasonal businesses. November against October is apples-to-oranges for most stores; November against last November isn’t.
- Look at the shape, not just the badge. The dashed line shows whether a change came from one spike day or a steady shift. A promo spike that reverts looks very different from a baseline that moved.
Common uses
- Promo pre/post — was the promo’s lift real, or did it pull demand forward from the following week?
- Ad campaign rollout — did the new campaign move revenue, or just spend?
- Product launch — did the new drop raise the baseline, or was it a one-day spike?
What it doesn’t model
- Seasonality — Ordinary doesn’t strip out seasonal patterns. Pick the comparison window that makes sense for your business.
- Attribution — the Overview cards are store-wide. For per-channel changes, use Marketing Mix with Compare on. See Attribution reports.