UPDATE (4/16/2014): A few days ago Google Analytics issued a message to let users know Universal properties created prior December 2013 could be doubling stats and fixing themselves on their own. Google is currently working on this issue.
Have you noticed these sudden drops and peaks in your daily visits stats for the past several days? It usually lasts for about 2 or 3 hours before coming back to normal. The next day, it’s the same story over again: stats are acting funny.
Several Google Analytics users have noticed their daily visits stats are suddenly doubling or on the other hand, are dropping down to zero. Users agree they usually see a constant number of daily visits, and for most of them, it is unlikely their websites aren’t receiving any visits.
Most of these website are also sharing blog posts which are bringing a fair amount of visits. These blog posts are often picked up by influencers, which is reflected by an increase in visits and confirmed by the sources of these visits.
These visitors are also reflected in the real-time tab of Google Analytics.
So what is going on with Google Analytics ?
Though it doesn’t seem to be affecting other stats, we have our idea of what could be happening.
Since Google Analytics is slowly updating all tracking codes to the new Universal Analytics, we think this may be one of the reasons.
Let’s take a website running the old version of Google’s tracking code for example: what if Google Analytics started the process of updating the code to the new Universal Analytics tracking code and is collecting data twice? This could explain the double daily visits.
But what about those drop to zero visits that have been encountered a couple of times?
Google Analytics’ update frequency takes about 24 hours and even though the real-time tab of your dashboard shows online visitors, these visits could take up to 24 hours before being displayed properly.
Have you seen anything funny these past few days? What do you think it could be? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
31 Comments
Yes, we just recently launched a new website and were wondering why our stats were all over the place. We’d get super excited for the peak, as we have little data to compare it to, and haven’t yet found our “normal”. And then we’d check later, and find that our visitor stats had halved. Oh Google!
Hi Shirley, thanks for your comment. I think what’d be best is to wait a few days before looking at your stats so you don’t get too excited haha!
Hi, we launch a new website too and we noticed we got pretty good figures from mid January to Mid-March and suddently there was a drop we cannot explain. Few days later Google Anaytics left this message about Universal Properties…is there a chance that there was a bug beginning of this year doubling anormally all the metrics?
Hi Sarah,
Are these “doubled” figures still showing up on your stats if you select mid-January/mid-March? If yes, look at your traffic sources: a link to your website may have been created (through a blog post, a tweet, a Facebook post, etc.) bringing more visitors than usual. Hope that helps!
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