The Case of the Missing Page Views
I was just looking at the site earnings and I got a bit of a shock, from May 1 to May 4, pageviews have absolutely tanked by about half.
I went straight into Google Analytics and found that visits were holding up fine but the problem was that the bounce rate had rocketed from the usual 3.5% up to 12.5% and the page views per visitor had also fallen away.
So it looks like there was some sort of technical problem which put people off using the site for about 4 days and then everything went back to normal. It wasn’t such a critical problem that it killed the traffic completely but maybe the site was just slow or perhaps people with certain ISP’s were having a problem.
Having said that, we had no email reports of problems and usually as soon as there is the slightest glitch the support email box is filled with hundreds of complaints within minutes.
I’m not sure there is much more that I can do to investigate now so I’ll just park it for now and go back to it happens again.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Google suggests placing the analytics code at the top of your html body, however, if for some reason the analytics server that your site is using is playing up then it can impact your page load times and even stop the whole page from loading.
This is probably what happened to you, I recommend moving the analytics code to the bottom of your code just before and this will ensure the rest of the page renders before it gets the analytics code.
Cheers,
Duane.