4 replies to this topic

[johking]

Hi there

A friend has reported that all their GA data is gone. The site has been up for over a year, with the analytics last known to be working at the end of March.

I went to have a look and indeed there is a profile there showing a whole list of 0s and a "tracking not installed" warning. When I went to check the status, I found that the Web Property ID has -2 at the end of it, instead of -1 (which is the code on the site), so no wonder there are no results. The Website URL shows the www version.

There are a number of profiles set up for different small sections of this site which are working fine and show all their data for the past year. They have the -1 Web Property ID and show the Website URL as non-www.

This makes me think that the problem has to be the www/non-www issue, though why the main profile has changed like this I have no idea. By the way, the www address has a 301 redirect to the non-www address.

They are really anxious that they don't do something wrong and lose all their data for the past year (might it all be lost already?). Underneath the dud 0-data profile, there is a suggestion to add a new profile, with the correct Web Property ID (-1) and the non-www address.

Should they just add this new profile? Is there anything they can do to recover the lost data?

I have tried the Google Analytics forums and no-one is answering, so hope some of you smart folks can help me to advise them.

Hope this all makes sense but please ask if not!

Jo

[Michael Martinez]

They should embed the code for whichever profile has the history. They should not be trying to track analytics for www-versus-non-www. They should canonicalize their domain names (unless they are serving different content on the two variations, which a very small number of people have done).

[johking]

Hi Michael

Thanks for replying. They are not intentionally trying to track analytics for www versus non-www. The problem is that there is no profile with any history at the moment. The code on the website is and always has been the -1 version which was successfully getting data until recently. For some reason that profile is not there any more, only this -2 version with no data.

I can add the -1 version profile which should work, but I suspect it might just start gathering data again from scratch...

Thanks

Jo

[Michael Martinez]

I don't know. It sounds like someone somewhere broke something but it's hard to say what.

[johking]

I know - a real puzzle... Thanks for your time

Jo