Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

Google appear to have rush their Analytics service live and have made a right screw up of it. Firstly yesterday the site was so slow as to be unusable and when it wasn’t there was a maintance page up. Secondly after being asked to wait 12 hours for stats I still don’t have any after 24 hours. I’m not the only one which is nice to know, but how long before people adandon this service.

Update 16-Nov-2005 ~15:00: Just noticed I have some stats from Monday and Tuesday now - will blog on them when I get time.
Update 16-Nov-2005 ~22:00: On closer inspection the stats are from Monday mid day to Tuesday mid day so a whole 24 hours out of date assuming it is using GMT which isn’t a given because it doesn’t state the timezone anywhere.
Update 17-Nov-2005 ~13:30: When I try and log on now I get sent to the google home page at http://www.google.com - does anyone else have this problem?
Update 19-Nov-2005 ~10:30: Well it did one more update about 24 hours ago which revealed that stats had been lost. So for the last week I have 3 days stats out of 7; two of those days stats look highly dubious too. I would uninstall Google Analytics and probably will soon but it really is car crash deployment, I can’t look away.

Here is the graph showing the patchy stats Google Analytics is providing (during this period there has been zero downtime on the site in question The Humor Archives):

Update 20-Nov-2005 ~18:30: Google has shut Analytics to new customers because they cannot cope with demand, this is so lame. More on the story here and in Google’s own words. In the meantime my stats have updates and even filled in the day on the 16th. The stats however are woefully inaccurate compared to those obtained by my raw log files. Now I’m not expecting the actual figures to be the same but I am expecting the relative values between the days to be similar and they are not. Could I be more underwelmed?

Update 21-Nov-2005 ~21:00: Well very slowly the stats are taking shape as can be seen by the latest graph below, still very much out of date but slightly more accurate - the weekends are usually lower traffic days for this site.

Update 07-Dec-2005 ~21:00: Analytics seems to work as intended now, accept adding sites is disabled. Stats tend to lag by 24 hours which is a shame and as I’m not a adwords users the stats offer only marginally more than awstats.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.