Google Analytics Issue

Tracking Pages That Don't Exist!

[KaloVast]

I don't know if anyone here can offer any insight to my issue, but the Adwords team doesn't seem to understand and they keep giving me an answer to a question i'm not asking.

I was looking around in Google Analytics late last week and noticed that google is tracking pages located at /free/ and free/html. The only issue here is that /free/ is a page that is not in existence. Analytics tells me that 7% of our visitors are going to /free/, but there is no content on that page and you get a "page not found" error. I quickly created a redirect because Analytics is showing about 1,000 users per day being lead to that non-existent page. Now users who enter that page are going to the correct page at free.html.

So the Adwords staff is telling me that we do have a page in existence at /free/. I tell them we do not have a page there, they come back and tell me their "specialists" have looked into it and we do have a page in existence there. The thing is that we have never had a page at /free/ so i'm not sure how to proceed with them. They're just insisting that we have a page there. I feel like they're looking at the redirect and saying that's a page, but i've told them that i created the redirect on monday and this issue has been happening ever since we got Analytics up and running.

So yeah, i'm lost, scared and confused. Can anyone give me any insight other than telling me that we have pages where we don't really have pages? Thanks!

[cliffhanger]

hey,

trying sending them (google) a screenshot of the error page. tell them the browser version and system specs at your side. and make sure to tell them that you had cleared your cache data before you tried opening the page. this should help them troubleshoot.

thanx,

swayam

[cliffhanger]

also because you say this is regarding analytics, just wanted to ask, are the google guys using regular (posix) expressions to communicate.

just thinking... probably this is a miscommunication...

[KaloVast]

Thanks for the response, Cliff. I took your advice, gave them the information you suggested and i'm getting the same answer. They think the best way to take care of this problem is just to delete the analytics code from /free/, and i had to tell them again that it's impossible to delete the code from /free/ because /free/ does not exist, and so there is no code to delete if there is no page to delete it from.

Besides, even if the page did exist, deleting the code from that page wouldn't solve the problem. It would just stop me from seeing the problem in analytics. Good advice, Google!

[cgrantski]

Go to the Visitors Hostnames report and look for alien host names. Could be somebody stole your page code, used it on their own site in /free/ directory, and didn't realize they should remove the embedded beacon.

[g1smd]

Alternatively, have you used the "rename" function anywhere?

You use that to send a URL to Google to record that is different to the real URL for the page.

That could be an error in the settings at the GA website, or in your tracking code on one of your pages.