I detected anomalies in Google Analytics statistics for the year 2021 on a site I manage. The number of page views per session is in free fall, while the bounce rate and time spent per page is exploding (please, see the Google Analytics Datas link below).
I'm not sure if it's the current statics that are wrong, or the ones that were between February and October, or both, but there is definitely something wrong, and I don't know why.
Do you have any theories please?
Google Analytics Datas
Thanks a lot !
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Our main challenge in Google Analytics at the time is to measure the success of our magazine articles.
The problem is that views grow over time so in any timeframe we always have the older articles overshadowing the newer ones. Sidenote: The same problem occurs for measuring social media post success.
My idea of a solution is to measure the rate by which views on articles grow. An article that has a higher growth of views is much more successful than an older article with more views, but with a lower growth rate.
Alternatively something like "views within the first week(s) of publishing this individual article" would also be a good metric.
Unfortunately to some extent also the growth rates rely on this publishing period of individual articles if we are interested in an eternal high score of articles. But since we are mainly interested in recent articles, growth rate would still give us the desired result of showing the most successful recent articles.
Has anyone dealt with the same challenges and found any solution to this, in best case with Google Analytics?
These examples may help, of which I have direct experience.
In the data layer we included a date of publication for the article and then used this to determine growth. This was taken from the CRM and was relatively straightforwards for the dev team. This was stored as a custom dimension in Google Analytics.
We had nothing in the data layer but instead a I just used the date on which page views started appearing as a proxy for date of publication. Not entirely reliable, and you may want to filter by views >5, or whatever is appropriate, to avoid any hits from editors or staff before a page is visible in the site navigation.
In both cases I was exporting data either to Google Sheets (using for example the Google Analytics API addon for sheets) or BigQuery, where it was relatively straight forwards to identify the first date and then calculate, for example, views per day. In your case it would be having a function which looks at the date of publication + 7 days. You may also be able to achieve this with Google Data Studio or similar dashboarding platform.
I have a weird problem with one of google analytics accounts and I'm hoping someone can help me figure what might be causing it.
Essentially, in the middle of the day, Google Analytics stops showing data. It will show me my hourly revenue till about noon and then the data regresses back to show only hourly revenue till 8 in the morning. This screenshot was taken at 1:30 PM today:
The hourly revenue will update again at around 4 PM. Its a very irritating problem and I can't find any solutions on google for it.
Let me know if I need to provide any additional information that might help you understand my situation.
Thanks for your help!
Is this something new? Because I'm having issues with revenue tracking over the last 24 hours.
I've been using a SSIS Integration component to download data from Google Analytics in order to keep an historical view of some websites and track the evolution of them. Basically the metrics we track are Visits (now Sessions) and Visitros (now Users), and the dimensions are Year and Month. However, today I noticed that the data I downloaded for july had a variation on the Users metric. I heard that google analytics uses an estimation method to "calculate" some (if not all) of their metrics, could it be that after that they "adjust" the data with more acurate information? If so, is this mentioned in the documentation? (a link would be highly appreciated) Since the users are complaining that we are not delivering the real GA Data. I tried looked on the Google analytics documentation page with no luck.
Thanks for your time.
PS: Sorry for my english, it isn´t my native language
If you are using the standard version of Google Analytics (you'll know if you are paying $150k for premium), data is sampled depending on volume. Have a read of this article can-you-trust-your-google-analytics-data
I have seen very slightly differing results being returned if you repeatedly call the api with the same historical parameters repeatedly. In my case the figures only differed by 1-2 over a daily set of several thousand, but nevertheless it differed.
If you want to guarantee your results, consider upgrading to premium
Sampling could be an issue if what you are requesting is over 50,000 rows for the time period you are requesting. To avoid it you can download more often, such as daily.
But I think your issue is that there is a processing time for Google Analytics - if you are downloading at 3 am on the 1st it is probable that the processing for the previous day has not finished.
Google Analytics Premium SLA is for 4 hour data freshness, so even that would have trouble. Pragmatically you should allow 24 hours before you download data for the previous day, 48 hours for e-commerce data.
Thirdly make sure it is not Unique Visitors you are requesting, as this is dependent on the time period you are requesting.
I have come across quite a peculiar issue. In one of my Google Analytics accounts, I have it linked together with two different Adwords account. All good so far.
The issue is that one of the Adwords accounts is in dollars (which cannot be changed), and the other one in my local currency. Looking at my Google Analytics reports, I am currently seeing the Adwords cost as my local currency for both, which is totally wrong.
Let me give an example:
$1 is, let's say, roughly worth 10 in my local currency.
So, given that I spend $150 in my Adwords account, it would show up as 150SEK in my GA-reports (SEK being my local currency). It should in fact be 1500 since the Adwords spend is in dollars, and there is no conversion done between the two systems with a mismatching currency.
Does anyone know how I can see the correct spend inside my Google Analytics account, seeing as the two Adwords accounts are using different currencies; SEK and dollars?
As far as I know, it imports the value only and will show the currency selected in Analytics. The 150 comes from AdWords, SEK is the currency in Analytics, so it'd show 150SEK.
Not many references in other help forums (I was trying to find some discussion that would help confirm my guess :) but I found this little snippet which mentions that the currency and timezone must match.
GA supports multi-currency however it is only for e-commerce metrics. You could upload data using the Cost Data Upload but "This feature is intended for non-Google paid campaigns. To import Google AdWords data, link your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts." All in all you cannot have cost data for two currencies in one view, however you could link the one account to a separate view (with the correct currency setting)
In recent 2 days, my website's average visits duration fell from about 1:30 to 50sec in Audience>Overview window and fell from 2:00 to 1:30 in Content>Overview window. The visits duration parameters has a steady value for a long time.
The website (www.rapidtables.com) seems to function well.
Hosting server activity history graph seems normal.
All other analytics parameters (visits and pages/visit) seem normal.
Why visit duration is different in Audience>Overview and Content>Overview windows?
What could have caused the sudden drop in the duration parameter? (analytics bug / old urchin.js usage ...)?
Do you have historical data to compare to? If so, is this the first year it has happened, or do you see a dip about this time every year? If you have absolutely verified that nothing went wrong with your tracking code or your website in general, then it boils down to speculation. You just have to research the industry your site caters to and look for reasons that might have caused it. Maybe some new competitor opened shop? Maybe whatever product or service you offer is "seasonal"?