14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that it fixed an issue affecting Google Chrome and Analytics, ironically both Google products. A bug in Chrome introduced a couple of weeks ago resulted in incorrect measurements for websites using analytics. The latest Chrome stable update fixes the problem.
"Chrome version 6.0.472.55 was an incremental update to a new version of Chrome released on September 7 and announced here. There was a bug in the JavaScript engine that reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case," Jeff Gillis, from the Google Analytics Team, wrote.
"This caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics' JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count for some websites, for their visitors using that particular version of the Chrome browser," he explained.
"A fix was released for all versions of Google Chrome on Wednesday, September 22. Chrome users were automatically updated to version 6.0.472.63 over the last few days," he announced.
The bug in Google Chrome affected the JavaScript code webmasters use to keep track of visitors to their sites. Because the code was interpreted incorrectly, visitor numbers and their activity was not reported correctly.
Webmasters saw an unusually high visitors count while page views saw a big drop. The bug was active during September 7 and September 22 and affected Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 and up. The latest update to the stable channel, Chrome 6.0.472.63 fixed the issue.
However, sites may not have been affected during that entire period, it depends on what version Chrome users were running when visiting the site. Even though Chrome has a silent update system, which installs new versions within days of their availability, some users may have not updated in that time.
By now, most users should have updated to Google Chrome 6.0472.63 which includes the fix so analytics data should be reported correctly now.