I’ve always considered my data to be fairly safe with Google, but it seems as though Google has lost some Analytics data last week. If you’ve logged on to Analytics yesterday you might have noticed a little message from Google:

Looking at one of our client’s transaction data, we noticed that the dates with low transactions coincide with the dates mentioned in the notice.

Most accounts were affected by the processing error, though Google promises that the correct data will be restored by today. Data from Adwords is still accurate, but some of the data from our direct and organic transactions which were tracked by Analytics may be lost, according to Google.

“E-commerce transactions were affected more heavily than other metrics, and a small percentage of e-commerce data from those dates may not be recoverable.”

For those of you without e-commerce tracking, Google says a small percentage of data may still be lost. A small percentage isn’t much to you or me, but if we’re talking about Google scale data – a small percentage is a lot.

As a side note, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed screwy numbers with Analytics. I’ve been wondering if Google’s math is off in their calculations of Total Absolute Unique Visitors:

If you pull out a calculator and add the individual numbers up, you’ll see that the individual numbers add up to 27,938. I still haven’t been able to figure out where Google gets 26,703 from. I’ve seen this in every account I’ve come across. If someone knows why this is happening, please enlighten me.