Google Analytics not tracking?

September 1, 2009 8:35 AM

Did clearing my cookies and cache prevent Google Analytics from tracking my blog?

I have a fairly new blog and I installed Google Analytics about 3 weeks ago. This morning (Tuesday), it showed that there no visitors to the site yesterday (Monday) which I know is not right because there were a couple of comments posted yesterday and previous stats show that the blog does have a small number of regulars.

I am wondering if clearing all my cookies and cache (in order to install a widget) which I did on Sunday night caused this aberration, i.e. Google Analytics could not track the statistics due to the clearing. And if so, what I can do to enable Google Analytics again? Google Help didn't, erm, help. If you can't already guess from my language, I am not totally tech-savvy, so please be gentle :) Any help is appreciated - thanks!

posted by serunding to technology (3 comments total)

Cookies are files stored on your computer. They are unrelated to page visit tracking for your blog.

Google Analytics is going to track people visiting your page by also tracking a small amount of data that you embed in your page as part of their instructions. If you create a page but don't embed their tracking code, visits to that page won't be registered.
posted by odinsdream at 8:45 AM on September 1

Assuming this site in question is Highoverhappy, (nice blog!) — check the installation of the Google Analytics code -- looking at the page source, I'm not finding it, so perhaps your widget installation uninstalled it. It's not your cookies, though; it's the coding on the blog page, which is not resident in your computer.
posted by beagle at 8:46 AM on September 1

That's the blog beagle, thanks :)

I understand now that it's not the cookies fault. I'll look into how to restore the Google Analytics code. Appreciate it.
posted by serunding at 9:22 AM on September 1