Traffic Jam: Google Chrome 6 Apparently Screws Up Google Analytics
Here’s how one site administrator describes the issue on a Google support forum:
With the release of Chrome 6 we’ve seen a huge jump in Unique Visitors and Visits, which would show that the issue (some sort of Cookie “dropping”/overwriting) happens during the visits as opposed to in between the visits. This also pushes the Avg. Pageviews per Visit down, so we know that those really aren’t just extra visits that we receive. Looking at the Avg. Pageviews per Visit by each of the version (5, 6, 7), I can see Chrome 5 has a healthy ~20 pageviews per visit average, while 6 & 7 have around 3 pageviews per visit, which points to session (cookies) being cut down all the time.
It looks like this has been going on for weeks now, too. We’ve just delved into our own Google Analytics logs and are also seeing similarly odd behavior from Chrome browsers starting at the beginning of September. Chrome 6’s release date with September 2.
We’ve reached out to Google for more information. Update: Google has given us this statement.
‘A bug in Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case, which caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics’s JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count. This bug has been fixed in the most recent releases of Google Chrome and all users have been automatically updated with the bug fix. While we believe this issue is fixed, we’ll be closely monitoring over the weekend and beyond.’