Analytics can be very helpful tools to any website owner who wants to better understand the behaviors and patterns of his or her customers.  Most analytics solutions are transparent to website visitors, meaning that they don’t get in the way or show up to web surfers.  There are many options when it comes to analytic software and solutions.  Some are quite expensive and complicated.  And some aren’t.

One of the easy and free solutions comes from Google.  Like most analytics products, Google Analytics is transparent to users.  However, like any change or addition to a website, the small string of code required to send data to Google can cause browser errors.  While they’re very rare, they do happen and the Google Analytics Blog has three suggestions for dealing with errors should they occur.

Check the Code

This seems pretty obvious.  But I’ll bet a vast majority of the questions and troubleshooting that Google does regarding Analytics has to do with code that hasn’t been installed properly.  By “installed” I mean copy and pasted.  Like any bit of code, one wrong character will cause the entire thing to stop working.  Since Google assures us that, if installed properly, the code will not generate errors, it’s important to make sure it’s been installed properly.  And while it’s never wise to assume a piece of software would NEVER cause problems, Google Analytics has been put to use enough times to grant a little credence to Google’ claim of flawless code.

Test Your Page

Google Analytics uses JavaScript, so if you have other JavaScript on your page it’s POSSIBLE that the two are scripts are conflicting one another.  While Google says it’s analytics code is designed to not interfere with other scripts, there is not guarantee that it won’t.  And if you add Google Analytics code and suddenly have problems, it’s possible that conflicts are the problem.  Google suggests commenting out the analytics code to see if that helps.  If it doesn’t, the error probably isn’t due to Google’s code.  In that case, it’s time for some debugging.  Party time, right?

Secure Your Site

If your site is using secure elements (https://), the Google Analytics code needs to be secured as well.  Luckily, there’s an easy way to have Google Analytics generate that secure code.  If you’re having problems on secure pages, make sure you’re using the right version of the Analytics JavaScript.

Nine times out of ten, Google Analytics code just works without any problems.  But you can never say never.  These are three excellent places to start researching possible issues, should your encounter with Google Analytics fall into that one in ten less-than-eventless category.