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About a week ago, Google Analytics real time reports has been lagging behind with some metrics in both Google analytics 4 and Universal Analytics 3. Google claimed they fixed the issue twice but some site owners are still saying that there continues to be a lag in the reporting.
Issue timeline. The issue seemed to have started about a week ago, on April 5th or 6th. Google said it fixed the issue on April 7, 2022 but the issues lingered on through today, April 12th. There is also this issue tracker thread with many of the reports sent to Google about this issue.
What was the issue. Google Analytics real time reporting was either lagging behind or reporting lower than expected users. Google’s first confirmation on April 7th of this stated “we have become aware of a problem lasting between 2022-04-05 14:08:29 PDT and 2022-04-06 15:28:54 PDT where Universal Analytics is had an issue with its Realtime reporting interface. As a result, the interface may have shown incomplete results, or no data at all.” Google posted on that notice that “this problem has been resolved.”
Yesterday, on April 11th Google posted another status issue with Google Analytics saying “we’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Analytics. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Analytics, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. GA4 reports may appear blank or fail to load.”
Here are some tweets with the issue:
I’m currently seeing real-time PVs as normal, but my real time active users has dropped from 500-600 to around 30. I’m midway through organising Consent Mode stuff and I’m terrified I broke something! So please do confirm if it’s just realtime reporting bugging out.
Yeah I debated pinging you Barry. 1st I saw someone else report the real time analytics issue was this am, but it's been going on since 6pm pacific or so 4/5. Realtime is under reporting active users https://t.co/sXfrFo1NTw
in my accounts, the error only happens in views with filters applied… rawData views I don't see this problem. Do you see similar behavior?
in all cases I see less than 10%, and with this trick 100%
in GA4 I don't see error in realTime😎Is Google trying to tell us something?
Why we care. So if you noticed weird or just “off” reporting within Google Analytics, both GA4 and UA3, you are not alone. Google supposedly has fixed the issues but we are still seeing reports of the reports not being correct. Keep this in mind if clients or your boss is asking for some recent metrics and analytics.
Postscript: Google added a notice about this in a help document saying “you may notice low realtime data in the Real-Time report in your Universal Analytics property. To get the most accurate realtime data, it’s recommended that you use the Realtime report in a Google Analytics 4 property.”
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