Dabr in Indonesia
If you read my personal blog then you already know I'm a huge fan of Google Analytics - It really is the daddy. It tells me a lot of things about how people use my sites but it failed me in one way recently.
It told me that there was a 45% drop in visits to dabr.co.uk from Indonesia that lasted 20 hours last month (one day basically). You can see the little drop on January 6th affecting the total visits graph above. But what it couldn't do was tell me why.
That's where Twitter came in. After tweeting my interest in what happened on the 6th Jan in Indonesia, it was revealed that an important soccer match occurred on that very day: Indonesia vs Oman. Could it really be a soccer match that caused such a drop?
A while later I was told that one of the major telecoms providers had serious downtime - and that's something I can investigate in Analytics. After playing around with a custom report I found a 100% drop in usage from that provider during the exact period. Without a doubt this must have been the true cause.
A recent addition to Analytics is "annotations", which gives me the ability to label this anomaly for future reference just in case I forget. Thanks Google :)
Incidentally, the drop had such an impact on Dabr's overall stats because of one simple fact: visits from Indonesia make up almost half of all traffic to the site!
