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Google Analytics Stops Reporting Stats

I am reading for quite some time now and I see a lot of people asking over and over: “Why Google Analytics suddenly stops showing any new stats but it was working just yesterday / a week ago / in last month?”

Based on my experience I’ve compiled a list of why usually such happens (even if there is a “Receiving Data” sign for this Google Analytics profile) and I hope you will find it useful.

I am looking forward to make this list complete, so feel free to share your experience in comments! Thanks.

Reason #1: You have multiple GA accounts or profiles for the website and you are looking into the wrong one

As banal that may sound, that happens. View source of the page on your website, locate the “UA-…..” number in getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”); in you tracking code and make sure it corresponds to the profile number you are looking at.

Reason #2: You’ve changed design of your site and forgot to apply GA tracking code to new design

That may also include changing of the Blog design template if you are not using a plugin/admin settings to add the GA tracking code. To check for that open your website, right click on the page, select “View Page Source” and search for “google-analytics.com/ga.js” string (that string is common for both asynchronous tracking code and standard one). If you can’t locate this string in the page source the tracking code isn’t there anymore, so add it and that should fix the problem.

Reason #3: The tracking code got messed up during some changes on the website

There a multiple way how the code can get messed up:

• Partial GA tracking code . For proper tracking your website should include complete and working GA code snippet. If code is corrupted somehow you will most probably see your browser reporting a JS error while you have your site opened – so check the browser status bar for error or get some developer tool addon which allows seeing more info about JS error (e.g. ).

• Duplicated GA tracking code . Check your page source (open the page in browser, right click on the page, select “View Page Source”) and count how many timer “google-analytics.com/ga.js” string appears in the page code.

  Even though GA allows to have multiple tracking codes on the same page those codes need to be modified in order to get it working, and that is a topic for a whole separate article. Assuming what having multiple tracking code isn’t your intention you need to make sure only one code snippet is included to the page in the same time. If you see duplicated code snippets eliminate all but one. It can be pretty easy if you’ve added snippets manually – just remove all but one. However it can be a challenge to find where the multiple tracking codes come from if you are using some CMS or a Blog software. So check if you have tracking code add-ons/plugin or multiple of those installed and maybe added a code manually in the same time.

• Special characters in the snippet got replaced with HTML entities . Generally that should not be an issue if you are using some simple text editor to insert the tracking snippet. However if you used a website editor or a CMS to insert the code snippet, some characters in the code snippet may got replaced with their HTML entities (something like & or &quote;). Check if that isn’t an issue and if so you may need to find another way how to insert the code.

• Special characters got replaced by some others while copying/pasting the code. That issue may rise if you copied the tracking code from, lets say, Word Document (or other rich text editor) before including it to your website.

  Generally any kind of rich text editor isn’t good for programming code because they tend to replace some special characters with others which look better in a text document, however it mess the programming code. That may affect single and double quotation marks, ampersands, slashes, dashes and so on.

  So if you used some rich text editor to copy/paste the tracking code, my advice would be to get a new code from the web interface of Google Analytics directly and insert it again, because it can be quite of challenge to locate special character replaced this way (they will look almost the same) to fix them. I should also note what in this case the tracking of website with such code would not work from very beginning, but I thought it is good idea to list this case here as it .

• Leading or tailing spaces before / after UA-XXXXXXX-X in the getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”);
  That happens when you do use some CMS/Blog software and inser the tracking code with plugin/add-on. So view the page source, locate getTracker function and make sure there no spaces before or after its argument, and if it does go to the add-on/plugin settings and remove those no-needed spaces. Believe me that too.

I really hope my checklist helped you to locate problems caused google analytics to suddenly stop reporting stats. However if it didn’t, or if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment here, I will be happy to help!