CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analytics
Joel Taylor
Joel Taylor

Reputation: 23

Google Analytics reports a ~70% decrease in traffic, and it's not true

I have verified that our traffic has remained steady via other tracking devices we have on the page. So, it's def. not an inbound traffic problem.

I can watch live traffic between: ChartBeat, Zopim & GA and both ChartBeat & Zopim have the same count (around 70 sessions) and GA reports 8. I understand there will be differences, but not in this magnitude.

I've triple checked the integration: https://onceamonthmeals.com looking at the stats, the drop is across all content, all devices, all OS's - so it doesn't seem to be a technology problem. No JS issues.

If you do look at the implementation you'll notice two GA profiles being tracked - this has been set up for months and we've had successful numbers being tracked on both profiles. And now both profiles report 1/4 less traffic. This also rules out some sort of GA admin change that might've filtered visitors.

It's like, GA said, "eh, we're only going to count 1/4 of your traffic, starting today".

Any other info I can provide to help solve this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 173

Answers (1)

Eike Pierstorff
Eike Pierstorff

Reputation: 32770

Actually the Google Tag Assistant says "no http response detected" and the network tab shows no calls to the GA endpoint. When I use the Google Analytics Debugger I get the message:

Running command: ga("send", "pageview")
analytics_debug.js:9 Storage not available. Aborting hit.
analytics_debug.js:9 Running command: ga("create", "UA-XXXXXX-X", {name: "oldTracker", cookieDomain: "https://onceamonthmeals.com"})
analytics_debug.js:9 Creating new tracker: oldTracker
analytics_debug.js:9 New visitor. Generating new clientId
analytics_debug.js:9 Running command: ga("oldTracker.send", "pageview")
analytics_debug.js:9 Storage not available. Aborting hit.

"Storage not available" means that GA cannot set a cookie to store a client id. I'm reasonably sure this is because you include the protocol when you set the cookie domain:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X', { 'cookieDomain': 'https://onceamonthmeals.com' });

This should be just "onceamonthmeals.com" (or it might even be unnecessary to set the cookie domain at all).

So there is at least one JS problem you should check, although this does not explain why it worked before.

Upvotes: 1

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