Google Analytics Admits Errors, Data Loss

Human nature being what it is, people often find a way to complain about excellent free products.  Yet following an admission that Google Analytics experienced errors for most of a week and permanently lost some data, users are taking the news rather well.

 Google Analytics

To document the extent of the damage, an official dashboard notice stated, "Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th.  Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed.  The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days.  Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates."

The only problem, insofar as most users are concerned, is that the notice didn’t appear until the last 24 hours.  A discussion on the WebmasterWorld Forums started on May 6th.  Alistair Lattimore grew suspicious way back towards April 27th.  So Google’s timing isn’t great.

Still, Lattimore strongly recommended "utilising the ecommerce functionality within Google Analytics" in his post about the issue, and instances of people swearing off the free service seem to be nonexistent.

For whatever it’s worth, the Google Analytics Team also assured users, "We sincerely apologize for this processing issue and are taking every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future."  That’s wise – people won’t hold their tongues forever.