An interesting issue for discussion

My friend, who works as a web analyst, called me today and told a story about Google Analytics. It turns out that from April 30 to May 5 of this year, Google Analytics experienced processing errors and lost a lots of valuable data. Naturally, as all corporations do when they try to save face, Google claimed that almost all data would be saved (but not all of it) and “re-processed” by May 14.

Well, to put it mildly, my friend’s valuable data was not recovered as of today. In spite of great reports that he presented to his clients previously, his GA shows 100% of bounce rate for three days in a row, although the number of visits and unique visitors were preserved and “re-processed”. Naturally, as a web analyst, my friend is frustrated, because he worked really hard to get good ratings and traffic. And now he will get a lot of questions from his clients and feel bad for them.

This unfortunate event brings an interesting issue for discussion. It also shows that web analytics is still in the process of growing up. Personally, I still think that Google Analytics is a great web analytics tool and, mind you, it is free, while other tools on the market are not. We will never find out the whole truth about what happened, but it was definitely something out of the ordinary, because I don’t remember any other time when Google Analytics let us down.

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