GA causing me to panic

bounce rate and page views way out

[denisl]

I assume I am not unusual in checking my figures on GA morethan once during the day.
The last couple of days I have been worried about my two main sites, while show reasonable visitor numbers, have been showing unusually high bounce rates and low pages per visit. This has still been the case at the beginning of the next day (being in europe, I tend to do a serious check of figures just after the start of the new day Pacific Time).
It has caused me to spend some time looking for problems.

I have just realised how much these figures get changed during the following 12 - 24 hrs - this is new.
I have often seen the visitor number totals receive an increase after the day has ended but have not seen bounce rate and pages per visit change so much.

For one site, when I checked this momrning, yesterday showed a bounce rate of 72% and 1.8 paages per visit. Now these figures have been corrected to 52% and 3.0 pages per visit. The total visitor numbers have been increased by around 10% but that is not so worrying.

I guess I shall learn to wait for the figures to stablise - anybody else see this?

[Quadrille]

Not exactly taht - but you'll get the best of GA if you look at it less often. The results are NOT real time, so I'm not surprised that there's corrections.

Best to use them to look back, rather than expect a useful 'now'.

[cgrantski]

I almost always see the data change over 2 or 3 days, both upwards and downwards. And a few months ago for a while things changed tremendously during that time. To the point of being described as "a real mess." So, yeah, take everything with some skepticism.

[inbound]

The delay in collecting data from the many machines that make up the Analytics cluster/s has got much worse recently, so much so I can't believe there isn't a major fuss being made about it.

Also, the historical stats have been broken on/off for a few weeks now. Not good. Yet Google have not acknowledged any issue (makes you wonder if they are even aware of the problems).

I suppose it's time to pay for a stats package with an SLA.

[grigoroo]

I have found that recently the prior day's stats, particularly pageviews, are delayed so I am sure that current day stats have to be pretty unreliable. If I check yesterday's numbers too early in the day, my pageviews are way down and my bounce rate way up. Later in the day it clears up.