We've noticed a few issues with clients using Universal Analytics this last month, when visits for the last day have been double the normal trend. It then corrects itself a few hours later - so seems to be just a blip with the data processing at Google. Others have noticed the same problem. The temporary fix is to only generate reports with time series ending the day before yesterday. i.e. ignore yesterday's data. Now Google have officially acknowledged the problem Looking forward to seeing that one fixed!

There’s a difference between the ‘screen size’ measured as standard in Google Analytics and the ‘browser size’ or ‘browser viewport’. Especially on mobile devices, there are pitfalls comparing the two. Browser viewport is the actual visible area of the HTML, after the width of scroll bars and height of button, address, plugin and status bars has been allowed for. Desktop computer screens have got much bigger over the last decade, but browser viewports (the visible area within the browser window) are not. The CSS tricks site found only 1% of users have their browser viewing in the full screen. While only 9% of visitors to his site had a monitor less than 1200px wide in 2011, around 21% of users have a browser viewport of less than that width. Simply put, on a huge monitor you don’t browse the web using your full screen. Therefore, 'screen resolution' may be much larger than 'viewport size'. The best solution is to post browser viewport size to GA as a custom dimension. P.S. Google Analytics does have a feature within In Page Analytics (under Behaviour section) to overlay Browser Size, but it doesn’t work for any of the sites I look at.

Google Analytics is clearly the number one web analytics tool globally. From a meta-analysis of different surveys, we estimate it is currently installed on over 50% of all websites or 80% of operational websites using any kind of analytics tracking. We looked at the following sources for this chart: Datanyze survey of Alexa top 1m sites (04/2014) BuiltWith survey of all websites (04/2014) MetricMail survey of Alexa top 1m sites Pingdom survey of Alexa top 10k sites (07/2012) W3Techs survey of their own sites (04/2014) LeadLedger survey of Fortune 500 sites (04/2014)

The Channel report in Google Analytics (under 'Acquisition' section) splits out into 6 or more types of visit channel: Direct Where a visitor has: typed the URL into the address bar clicked on a link which is NOT in another web page (e.g. in a mobile app) visited a bookmarked link Organic Search All visits from search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo) which were not an advertisement. You used to be able to filter out people searching for your brand (which are more like Direct visits), but now the search terms are not provided. Paid Search Visits from search engines where the visitor clicked on an advert. Referral Where a visitor has clicked on a link in another website (not your own domain), but not including search engines or social networks. Social Networks Specifically links from known social network websites (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) Email From links tagged as medium = 'email'. Your email software needs to be configured correctly to add this tag. Display Links tagged as 'display' or 'cpm'. FAQs Can I change the channel groupings? Yes, you can change this under Admin .. (Selected View).. Channel Grouping. But we recommend you don't do this for your default view, as you won't be able to compare the historical data.