Market Appeal

Posts Tagged ‘Analytics’

From Friday afternoon UK time onwards Google stopped importing data from unlinked AdWords and Analytics accounts, but forgot to tell anyone.

As a result of this seemingly innocuous action some Google Analytics profiles stopped correctly identifying traffic coming from AdWords accounts with differing administrator details, meaning that many Analytics profiles suddenly started to show zero paid search traffic, instead of the regular flow.

For example, see the orange line, representing paid search traffic, that dropped right to zero over the weekend (despite there actually being over 100 visitors sent by Google AdWords).

Google paid search traffic (orange) apparently drops to zero

The AdWords ads continued to run unaffected, it’s just that their traffic is now being reported as organic rather than paid search.

Upon discovering this ‘error’ Monday (16/02/09) afternoon I called Google’s AdWords support line seeking an explanation as to what had gone wrong. The Support Engineer initially had no idea and eventually came back to me with the following explanation.

“We have stopped the auto-tagging of urls from unlinked AdWords and Analytics accounts in order to enhance account holder privacy. We were going to announce the changes, however, that got help up and we didn’t think that many people, unlike yourself, would notice all that quickly anyway – an announcement will soon be made.”

So, there you have it. According to a Google AdWords Support Engineer nobody thought that users might notice that their paid search traffic had suddenly disappeared from their Analytics accounts.

Of course, this won’t affect everyone. But, what about you?

As anyone familiar with Google Analytics will know, it’s often quick and easy to install.

Occasionally, however, there’s a problem. As happened to me, yesterday.

On this occasion I’d emailed the code for a new style Analytics tag to our client’s developers who had installed the code in the website footer, as instructed.

A few days later however their reports still contained no analytics data, despite the Google Analytics’ tag status checker reporting that everything was fine!

Unsure of the exact problem, I tried out EpikOne’s free Google Analytics tag checker for the first time, which a few hours later confirmed that the tags we’re not working after all.

Finally, I decided to replace client’s GA tag code with a fresh copy, and lo and behold, when I reran the EpikOne tester, it reported that the tags are now working fine. (Which was quicker feedback, than waiting for the first data to appear in Google Analytics.) Moreover, it also told me that one page still wasn’t registering properly, presumably because it doesn’t use the same footer template as the rest of the site.

I’m not always so impressed by the usefulness of free SEO [and analytics] tools, but on this occasion I have to hand it to EpikOne.