As with everywhere else in your Analytics tools, you can set a wide variety of filters to narrow down the list of titles you want to check out.
You can set a number of parameters for your Most Popular Titles graph. those options can be found here:
Here’s an explanation for each of your options:
Market:
You can select to view results for your own market (or another market’s) top-selling (or top-circulating, for libraries) titles. US regional associations are represented, as well as libraries, UK booksellers, and US Christian retailers. (It can be pretty interesting to see what’s moving ‘across the pond.’)
Timeframe:
How far back would you like to look? Viewing results for 1 month back will essentially show you the titles that are hot and selling right now. Looking farther back, like a year, will show a longer tail of sales, so to speak. Keep in mind that looking farther back will include other seasons, like the holidays, summer, etc. So if you’re using this graph to see if you’re missing any hot titles, viewing just a month or two of results makes sense. If you’re looking to ‘beef up’ a section of your shop, or even to create a new section, looking at a wider range of results makes sense for that exercise.
Number of Titles:
How much time do you have? What sort of project are you working on? How big is your shop? Generally, with this graph you’re not necessarily going to sift through each and every title that comes up. For example, many users sort of ignore the titles that come up in the Fresh/Hot portion of the graph (the green) as they have those titles and they’re doing well. People often look for titles they do not have on hand, or with which they’re not really doing very well…so pin-pointing possible gaps, really.
With that in mind, this shop can view the top 1000 titles and really just zero in on a few hundred that are either out of stock or ‘stale.’
If you’ve set a filter for a specific, smaller section in your store, there’s likely no need to see the top 1000 titles. The top 100 might be more than sufficient for your needs.
Minimum On Hand:
Set this to “0” to see all titles, including the titles you do not stock. Setting it higher will filter out those titles you do not stock, which will essentially show just the titles you have on hand that are market-wide top-sellers and show how they’re performing in your store. For example, setting the Minimum on Hand to “10” means that you’re only going to see the market’s most popular titles of which you have big stacks.
In the case above, most are doing great, but some are languishing a bit. Good information to know!
Shelf Days:
Shelf Days is fully explained here. This essentially allows you to set an upper and lower performance measure on your inventory. Basically, how well, and how quickly, are your titles selling?