Google has confirmed that there is a reporting delay in Google Analytics that’s happening for a “majority of users.”
Event data for Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and Google Analytics for Firebase are where the delays are occurring.
This issue is not affecting real time reporting.
At approximately April 14, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. ET is when the issue began.
Google explained that they expect to fix the issue itself within a few hours.
They also explained that “Mitigation work is still underway by our engineering team. Efforts thus far have limited further delays. A backlog of events (from up to ~3.5 hours ago) are being processed for a full resolution of this incident. We expect the mitigation and backlog processing to complete over the next few hours.”
There has been speculation by some in the SEO industry that these data issues are linked to Google’s announcement forcing everyone to move over to Google Analytics Version 4 earlier this year.
What Happened?
At 8:19 PM UTC on April 14, 2022, Google reported that they were aware of a problem with Google Analytics that was affecting a vast majority of users.
Their update was:
Beginning at Thursday, 2022-04-14 09:00 US/Pacific, analytics event data for Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Analytics for Firebase will be delayed. Thus far, only batch jobs and streaming are impacted. Realtime data is not affected.
Mitigation work is currently underway by our engineering team. We do not have an ETA for full resolution at this point. We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.
Workaround: None at this time.
There Have Also Been Other Issues With Google Analytics Data as of Late
Data issues with Google Analytics also occurred earlier last week: Google was experiencing latency issues with reporting data about a week ago, which started around April 5th or 6th.
Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com reported on this.
Barry explained:
Personally, I have been trying to replicate this for the past 24-hours and have been unsuccessful. But maybe this is specific to some regions and not impacting me in New York?
The Google status dashboard has not shown any issues with Google Analytics in the past 24-hours. I do not see any response from an official Google representative on these complaints, not in the forums and not on social (but Google Analytics on social in 2022 has been super inactive because of staffing). But there are numerous complaints on Twitter and in the Google Analytics Forums (I am linking only to one). Here is what the forum says:”
“Is anyone else experiencing outages in realtime active users are dipping and spiking sporadically right now.”
“Yes! Hope this is an outage, because it has lasted longer than most and was starting to scare me that it was something else wrong with my site.”
“Same here, and the active user on site has a big difference with active users.”
What Could Have Been The Issue?
Real time reporting in Google Analytics was likely perhaps lagging, or it was reporting the lower number of expected users.
Google first confirmed this issue on April 7th and 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 also posted a later update that explained that this issue has been resolved.
What Was The Impact Of These Issues?
Google explained that event analytics data in GA4, and Google Analytics for Firebase are the affected products that have these reporting data delays.
Google also explained that streaming and batch jobs were the tasks that are being impacted.
Google also explained that this issue did not impact real time data.
What’s Up With Google Analytics?
Clearly, something is off with Google Analytics and how it is processing certain types of data.
If you notice something is off within your own Google Analytics (with both GA4 along with Firebase), you are not the only one.
There are fixes coming for the delays in reporting and if you have clients that are requesting some recent reporting, it would be a good idea to explain to them why the data may be off. Or, you could explain that you would rather wait until the data issues are repaired before you complete this round of reporting for your clients.
