Is anybody happily using Google Analytics with big websites? (million+ pages, million+ monthly visitors)

Question

I was a happy customer of Google Analytics starting from the Urchin times. But something strange happened a few months ago and GA started showing a fake URL called "(other)" that is credited between 5% and 45% of all site traffic. I've tried filtering out some URL parameters to reduce the number of pages. Currently GA shows only 150,000 pages on my site, which is well below the half million limit that some people are talking about. Still, the page "(other)" is showing as the most popular page on my site.

Is anybody else struggling with this issue? I am wondering whether this could be a scalability issue. My site has been growing over the years, and currently doing 1.25 million unique monthly visitors and over 10 million pageviews. The site itself has around half a million pages. If you are successfully using GA with a bigger website than mine, please share your story. Are you using the Sampling feature of their tracking script?

Thanks!

Answer 1

For a huge website like and I would not use a Free Analytics. I would use something like Web trends or some other paid analytics. We cannot blame GA for this after all its a free service ;-)

GA has page view limits too. (5 Million page views)

Just curious. How long did you take to add the analytics code to your pages? ;-)

Answer 2

I get about 3.5 million hits a month on one of my sites using GA. I don't see (other) listed anywhere. Specifically what report are you viewing? Is (other) the title or URL of the page?

Answer 3

In Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics Brian Clifton writes that above a certain number of page views, Google Analytics is no more able to list all the seperate page views and starts aggregating the small amount ones under „(other)” entry.

By default, Google Analytics collects pageview data for every visitor. For very high traffic sites, the amount of data can be overwhelming, leading to large parts of the “long tail” of information to be missing from your reports, simply because they are too far down in the report tables. You can diminish this issue by creating separate profiles of visitor segments—for example, /blog, /forum, /support, etc. However, another option is to sample your visitors.

Answer 4

You can get a loooonnnngggg way on Google Analytics. I had a site doing about 25mm uniques/mo. and it was working for us just fine. The "other" bucket fills up when you hit a certain limit of pageviews/etc. The way around this is to create different filters on the data.