Perhaps you have heard someone else utter these unfortunate words, or maybe you have heard yourself say them as your stomach cringed and tried to run away from the implications. No requests were made to change analytics code, but something clearly changed. What do you do now? In the majority of cases, the code does not just simply change itself, so most data anomalies align with some sort of code push, new site release, etc. Even the slightest oversight can send your numbers plummeting fo...

Last Thursday's Google outage had a dramatic impact on more than just Google users; it was widely reported that the outage killed 5% of Internet traffic and prevented users from accessing popular services such as Gmail and YouTube. The less-reported aspect of the story is that the outage also impacted some websites using Google Analytics. During the outage, the visitors to those sites noticed distinctly slower-than-normal loading times. The slow-loading websites problem was...