Google Analytics Admits Errors, Data Loss

By Doug Caverly - Wed, 05/14/2008 - 14:29

Recovery underway

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.

News Tags: Google, google analytics, Outages

About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

5 Comments

By Internet Marketing Indonesia (WPN reader) - Sun, 11/09/2008 - 01:54

thanks for your article.

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By Guest (WPN reader) - Mon, 09/08/2008 - 17:08

google error-do not get the page requested

Hey out there. I have a weird situation with my home PC. When I Google and even Yahoo search a subject, I click on that subject, but only get ads and weird pages unrelated to the subject I clicked on. I never had that happen before. I just rid myself of the Windows XP 2008 spyware that was going around. I made a couple registry changes to get my screensaver and background tabs back after the nasty adware critter made it disappear. But, can't figure out this latest crazy thing.

Anyone ever seen this???

Thanks, Dave in Tampa

By used buses (WPN reader) - Sat, 06/28/2008 - 16:01

EXpected Considering the Size

This is expected for any massive corporation like Google. The size, reach and amount of technology involved with running GA must be staggering. It's actually quite amazing that there are not more issues, I think they have done a great job.

By Yummyfood (WPN reader) - Sun, 05/18/2008 - 10:01

April 30th?

Having a low traffic website, it easy to me to check if there is something wrong in my stats.
GA started to mess up data with a lot of inconsistent reports way before April 30.
They may have lost some data from April 30th, but in my case, reports are useless since the first half of March and nothing has changed yet.

By Simply Clicks (WPN reader) - Thu, 05/15/2008 - 13:40

Google Analytics - outage

I had noticed some data variance between the reported conversions in Adwords and the data in analytics. Seems you must be careful not to rely entirely on Google.