Google Analytics: What is this /NaN thing?
Thursday, May 31st, 2007Recently we started setting up our clients with Google Analytics. After Google’s recent upgrades to a more Ajax styled reporting GUI, we found it to be quiet the upgrade. There’s tremendous improvements in layout and flexibility, along with simplified explanations. Very easy for our customers to get in there and get around.
For one of our clients, we started to see the characters “/NaN” as one fo the pages of significant traffic, located in the Content reports. There’s no page called /NaN, it is actually a JavaScript error that means “Not a Number”.
Well, it turns out that this is usually an indication that there’s some other JavaScript on the web page that interfering with the JavaScript that is download from Google. The way to fix this, is to move Google’s code up into the <head> tag of your web page.
We usually add the Google Urchin code at the bottom as indicated by Google, but in this case, the second recommendation it above all other JavaScripts.
Once we did that, Google Urchin code was run first and that fixed our odd /NaN problem.
