I created an Excel traffic spreadsheet for one of my clients so he can clearly see custom variables (all traffic, new visitors, returning visitors, search traffic, referral traffic) on a month-to-month bar graph. Back in May, I filled in the results for Jan, Feb, March and April. I wanted to check to make sure I was pulling the right numbers, so I compared Jan, Feb, March & April numbers with what I had on the spreadsheet. They're completely different - not one matches up. So my question is ... does Google Analytics change historical results? I can't seem to make any sense of this! Thanks!
well if you absolutely sure you have used the same settings to generate your report back then and now, they must have. Does it show more or less traffic now? Could it be they have partially lost some old data so it now show less?
One year submission data it is taking.....after one year the data will be deleted...not sure..but i heard somewhere///may be this was help u....
They "guarantee" that will they keep data for 24 months, but in fact it's often more than that - I've just checked and I've got a profile that has data back to 2006. May depend on how much traff c the site has, so how much data there is. There is a point at which they will pull sampled data if you're asking for a lot at once - if the figures are just slightly off, then it's probably that. If they are totally different - are you sure you are comparing the same metrics? e.g not trying to compare pageviews with vists?
Even though Google guarantee to keep data for 24 months only, but they haven't been removing any data yet. Your situation occur when you have a large set of data. Some results will be estimated from sampling. Here's a document you maybe interested int: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=161380
Thank you all so much for taking the time to help me. I did find a couple of other people on Google's own support forum having the same problem. No answers from Google though. The numbers are not vastly different, but enough to be annoying.