I have data missing in Google and don't know who to turn to for help

[StevenHowe]

Hi everyone,

I know this isn't the 'Google help forum' but I'm stuck and I hope someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

For a period last month - Thursday 22nd to Sunday 25th November Google Analytics reports our site as having 0 visits.

In addition we have two days which were strangely low - Weds 21st 105 visits, Weds 28th Nov 78 visits.

We normally get between 1000 and 1200 visits on a weekday from a global audience (I know that was the Thanksgiving weekend, but the US accounts for ~10% of total traffic).

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you do? The "report a bug" board on the Google help forum has a few entries like this, people with 0 visits shouting "help!" into the void with no response.

Ideas?

[StevenHowe]

Hi Paul,

Despite the fact that it looks like I won't get this back (though I've asked for server logs, so who knows) that was a stellar answer, thank you.

I will definitely add another profile to the site and also set up a notification warning.

I'll also make sure I keep this handy and refer back to it every time I set up a site!

Thanks again.

[ThompsonPaul]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Steven, but generally if you've lost data in Google Analytics, you'll never get a solution from Google themselves. There's just no support for these kinds of issues unless your a big player.

About all you can do is focus on making certain that nothing was done on your end to compromise the collecting of the data. Once you've confirmed that, you can use alternate sources to estimate the unrecorded traffic to correct for the hole in your data.

You'll want to really dive in to rule out anything that could have compromised the data collection. Any changes whatsoever to the site need to be investigated.

• Any changes that added or changed the order of JavaScripts could have created conflicts with the GA tag.
• Template changes could have resulted in an inadvertent removal of the tags, with later edits reinstating them
• any adjustments of the tags themselves, e.g. adding download or outbound link tracking

Really put on your thinking cap for this one - it can take some serious digging through what was going on on the site during that time period. Also have a look at the characteristics of the little bit of traffic you got on the latter 2 days to see if that point to a culprit. I just had an issue like this on the weekend for a client's site. Traffic dropped to a tenth what it should be. Turned out it was only registering traffic from mobile - which uses a different template. So I had a hint - later confirmed - that the GA tag had been edited on the main template (causing data problems) but not on the mobile template which collected normally.

To confirm you actually did have traffic, (e.g. that you weren't having server outages for example) and to get an estimate of the lost traffic, you can use your server logs. if you're hosted on a system using cPanel, you probably have something like AWStats automatically collecting traffic data in your server logs. These logs collect data differently than GA's JavaScript tags, but they'll still give proof you had traffic, and a good approximation of the volume.

To be better prepared in case this happens in the future, I strongly recommend a couple of steps.

• Create two additional GA profiles for your website - one called RAW which you NEVER touch - no filters at all, no customisations whatsoever. It's your backup if all else fails. And a second called TEST where you try out EVERY customisation before adding it to your working profile. (Note these will only start collecting data from the day created, so do it asap)
• Add another lightweight analytics app to your site, or at least make sure you're satisfied with the data collected by your server logging as a backup for what GA is collecting - and have a plan for archiving it.
• Add a custom Intelligence Alert to GA to email you anytime it detects a drop in traffic. I generally set mine to anything more than a 25% drop compared to same day the previous week. That way you'll know as soon as you have a problem and can investigate immediately.
• Add an Annotation to GA every time you make any kind of an adjustment or change to the site. Makes it much easier to track back to what you did that might have caused traffic changes/problems - or even to understand what led to significant improvement. (Because your memory will never be enough for that
• Set up a site availability monitoring service like Pingdom.com to notify you anytime you site becomes unavailable (if you don't already have something in place). Don't rely on your host for this.

Hope this gives you some next steps to deal with the problem. I know the frustration.

Paul

[StevenHowe]

I forgot to mention - I checked if there were any filters on there and there aren't.