Diagnostics makes regular, periodic evaluations of your Analytics implementation, and provides notifications as a gentle reminder of how to keep Analytics tuned to ensure the best data, performance, and analysis.
In this article:Overview
Diagnostics evaluates your tracking code, your Analytics account configuration, and your data to see where there are areas for improvement and where there are critical flaws in your implementation.
Diagnostics looks for things like:
- whether tracking code is present on your pages, and whether existing code is properly configured
- configuration anomalies like goals that have suddenly stopped recording conversions
- whether your ecommerce data is being recorded properly
For each discovery it makes, Diagnostics recommends a solution to potential or existing problems.
Using Diagnostics
Open one of your views. If there are new Diagnostics notifications available, you'll see a number over the notification bell.
Click the bell to open the notifications.
Each new notification includes a description of the problem, a likely solution, and links to:
- Check again: check this issue again during the next Diagnostics run to see whether you have resolved the problem.
- The Analytics page on which you can address the problem (e.g., Adjust goals, Configure Google Ads preferences).
- Ignore: ignore the issue and do not issue further notifications.
- Details: learn more about the problem and possible solutions
When you click Details, you see more comprehensive information about the problem.
Click Learn more to open the relevant education material for that problem (e.g., a Help Center or Google Developers article).
If you take steps to fix a problem, click Check again to have Diagnostics reexamine the issue to determine whether your approach solved the problem. If the problem was solved, you don’t receive any further notifications. If the problem persists, Diagnostics reminds you again after the next evaluation of your Analytics implementation.
If you ignore a notification, it is archived, and Diagnostics makes no further checks or warnings of that problem. However you have the option to restore the notification to its original state.
Caveats
In order to evaluate your Analytics implementation, Diagnostics crawls your web pages as GoogleBot, and does so in a way that minimizes any inflation of traffic data.
Many websites are configured to recognize that GoogleBot is not a real user, and so GoogleBot traffic is not included in any site statistics.
In addition, under normal circumstances, GoogleBot does not trigger false ad clicks and the consequential false hit data getting sent to Analytics. However, if you send your ad traffic through a third-party before it arrives at your site, that third party may record a hit. Savvy third parties recognize that GoogleBot is not a real user and not a legitimate generator of traffic data, and so rerouting through third parties does not usually inflate statistics. However, Diagnostics has no way to guarantee the sophistication of those third parties, and cannot categorically guarantee that there is no inflation of traffic statistics.
