I typically use GA by selecting the first day of the month then selecting the current day and viewing my results for the current month. At this point I have no special filters or anything, just the vanilla setup. I check GA daily and have noticed on occasion that GA will occasionally show me lower monthly visits than the previous day checked. It's as if GA is revising it's data first showing me X monthly visitors only to change those numbers to X-Y the next day.
Yesterday I got a decent spike in traffic and was happily watching new visits/page counts come in from a specific domain that linked to my site. I also have regular users that access my site directly. I wake up this morning and all the traffic from yesterday is gone. I am seeing data come in for today, but yesterday shows 0 visitors and 0 page views. Any idea what is happening?
[SFMPE] In the last two days I also noticed similar changes. On Wednesday I saw 1600 visitors in GA for Tuesday, but on Thursday only 600 for Tuesday. On Thursday I saw 1600 visitors for Wednesday, today (Firday) only 600. Today (Friday) I see 1600 visitors for yesterday. I guess tomorrow it will change to 600 again. Meanwhile Awstats shows increase in traffic: 1200 on Tuesday, 2400 on Wednesday, 4000 on Thursday. I also noticed some sort of robot activity (spammy meaningless comments-flow with links) so I think it's up to that, and GA just made some second cleaning.
Not sure.
Related
I pull a report for new users to my site every month. Ive gone and looked at those numbers again, and the numbers for all the previous months (up to 7 months ago) have increased by around 30 new users.
Why would this be? Im using a 360 account so the refresh rate should be around 8 hours max - but it seems like old data is still being pulled into GA months later.
Any advice as to why this would be tru would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Before Tuesday, March 14th, we saw the data lag in Google Analytics at approximately 1-2 hours. (It was never immediate.) You can see this effect on the Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview page if you search by date and select "today" to "today" (1 day's worth of data)
As of Tuesday, March 14th, we started seeing the lag for this overview report anywhere from 8-12 hours, with an inconsistent aggregation time. For example, it is now 4 PM here on the east coast (EDT), and here is a screenshot of our GA overview tab (I have obscured the revenue number for our privacy). As you can see, there are no numbers after 6:00 AM.
We saw this same effect yesterday (about 8-10 hour lag), and the following day the overview report seemed to fix itself (catch up with all of the aggregated data).
Now, what's more interesting, is that if we either A) Add a "Secondary Dimension" or B) use a "Custom Report", we can see all our data near real-time. For example, if I switch into the Ecommerce > Sales Performance report, then add a Secondary Dimension of "Hour of Day", I can see all my data through 2 PM today (about a 2 hour lag as it is now 4:22 pm as I am writing this)
[
Note that to replicate this I sorted the "Hour by day" column by descending order (showing most recent first.)
Our questions are:
(1) Does anyone know why searching by Secondary Dimension or Custom Report shows us the data in more real-time than just looking at the overview report?
(2) Can anyone else confirm that what used to be a 2-3 hour delay now appears as if it is a 8-12 hour delay, starting on or around March 14th (possibly a few days earlier, this is the first day we can remember seeing this effect)
We are using Universal Analytics (with Enhanced E-commerce) implemented via the newer analytics.js. We are NOT using the older ga.js (we moved away from that about a year ago.)
We are not a GA 360 customer, just a regular free account.
From Google Analytics Help Center article.
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics will result in the reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day processing, reduce the number of sessions your account sends to < 200,000 per day. For Analytics 360 accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits per month.
What it means is that for Standard accounts up to 48h delay is normal, if you have more data it can take more if you have less data it can be faster.
Regarding your observation that certain reports load faster than others this is linked to the design of Google Analytics Backends. Google will generate pre-aggregated tables with common reports to speed up consult and that sometimes can takes longer to process. Other non-common reports can't be answered by aggregated reports so it can be responded by a different backend that already has fresher data. So it is considered normal to see different levels of freshness in different reports.
Google Analytics 360 has fresher data of course.
This other table from the HC article highlights some of the differences and has more info.
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"?
I check my Google analytics on a regular basis to obviously see my daily hits and for some reason my UNIQUE VISITORS count dropped from 1770 to 1730 over a day. How this is possible?
I started to notice this about a week ago when I saw that my UNIQUE VISITORS count wasn't going over 1800 (which it should have considering the visits I receive). I receive an average of about 60 unique VISITS a day but even if it was 0 unique visits a day, it doesn't sound logical that my overall UNIQUE VISITORS count would drop.
Now I can't take GA seriously anymore ...
Anyone have this problem before and / or could shed any light on the matter?
The statistics are period based. When a day passes, the period (begin and end) advances a day as well. So is perfectly normal your total unique visits changes from one day to another, because the period changed too.
For example: lets suppose your site receive 60 unique visitors every single day. You check your Analytics today (13-08-2012) and see 1860 visits. That amout is the total unique visitors for the period from 13-07 until 12-08.
But lets say that your site receives only 10 visitors today. Tomorrow (14-08) you will see your total unique visitors drops from 1860 to 1810, because the period will be from 14-07 until 13-08.
Has anyone else seen this issue?
As of roughly 2 weeks ago, I get conflicting figures for the Total Visits metric between the Traffic Sources report and the other reports (e.g. Visitors, Dashboard). For example, for the week of 5/9/2010 through 5/15/2010, the Dashboard and Visitors reports both say 386 Visits. The Traffic Sources report says 157 Visits, and the 4 main source types (Search, Direct, Referral, Other) sum to 157 Visits, not 386.
Any ideas? Is this a known bug, or could there be a configuration issue?
Thanks.
Well it seems that quite a few GA users have observed unaccounted-for behavior, particularly during the past couple of months.
For instance,
18 - 19 May 2010:
more than 40 different GA users posted to the GA
User Forum all regarding the same
issue: no data whatever was
recorded in their GA Accounts
during the 18th and 19th of May. No
response from Google and nothing in
the GA Blog. Several users who had
other GA accounts that were functioning normally during this period, suggested that the problem might be caused by recent changes by Google to the GATC (which was in fact recently revised)--many of those who posted on the Forum said that indeed they had recently added the latest version of the GATC to their Sites/Pages.
6 - 9 May 2010:
Over 50 GA users reported, by
posts to the GA Forum, a complete
GA outage during the period 6 - 9 May
(no data appearing in their reports
for at least one of those days). This
time a GA Team member did respond with
a one-line response "there was a
delay in reporting, no data was lost."
This post also referenced a Twitter
message 4 from GA stating the same
thing.
In addition, i've seen a half dozen, perhaps more, recent posts (past 60 days) on the GA Forum in which users reported significant discrepancies between an aggregate figure and the sum of the constituents--both sets of figures from the same Report, e.g.,
Numbers Don't add up on the Absolute Unique Visitor's Report
Search Engine drill-down visitors don't match total
Neither Post was answered (either by the GA Team or anyone else).
Finally, since it's just a matter of clicking a menu and selecting a different option, i suggest comparing the figures you recited in your question with the analogous figures for Page Views, which is probably the simplest measurement in client-side analytics ("Visits" by contrast is strongly influenced by user cookie manipulation).
Through some trial-and-error looking at every specific source, I've traced the error to one item: within the Traffic Sources reports for the affected days (the issue seems to have partially righted itself as of yesterday's data, at least for my account), the delta/error/black hole was always equal to the Google CPC Search traffic for that day.
I have no idea what's causing the issue, but at least I know how to manually attribute the numbers. Hopefully Google has fixed this...
Thank you to all who commented/answered. I appreciate it.