Analytics look wrong or empty

Your analytics show nothing, or a number you do not believe. Most of the time the tracking is fine and something about what you are looking at is not what you assumed.

Your own visits are excluded

You can exclude your own IP address so your visits do not count. It stops you inflating your own numbers, which matters a lot on a site with modest traffic. Without it, a business owner checking their site ten times a day can be most of the traffic.

This produces two opposite complaints.

"I visited and nothing was recorded." Your IP is excluded and it is working as intended. Check from a phone on mobile data, which uses a different address.

"The numbers look too high and it's all me." Your IP is not excluded. Add it.

One catch: most home and office internet connections get an address that changes from time to time. An exclusion set months ago may no longer match the address you have today. If your own visits start appearing again, re-check the exclusion.

The site was only just published

Analytics record traffic from the moment your site is live. They cannot show anything from before that.

A site published this week has this week's data and no more. A newly launched site also genuinely gets very little traffic at first. Search engines take weeks to index a new site properly, and a site nobody has heard of gets few visitors regardless of tracking.

Fix: give it time. Look at week-on-week movement rather than absolute totals in the early days, and set up Google Search Console so you can see when search engines start sending people.

The date range is set to a quiet period

Every analytics view covers a date range. If it is set to a period with little traffic, you see little traffic.

This catches people in ordinary ways: a range left on a single quiet day, a range covering a holiday period, or a range whose end date is in the past so recent traffic is excluded.

Fix: read the date range on screen before drawing any conclusion. Widen it to the last month and see whether the numbers make sense.

Also remember that real traffic has rhythms. Most business sites are quiet at weekends and on public holidays. A drop over a bank holiday weekend is your customers, not your tracking.

Filters are still applied from earlier

Filters narrow what you are looking at to one page, one source, or one country. They persist while you move around, so a filter you set ten minutes ago is probably still active.

The symptom is numbers that look far too small, or a report that seems to be missing whole sections of your site.

Fix: look for active filters and clear them. Then read the totals again.

BrightSite and Google Analytics count differently

If both are running, they will not agree. This is normal and expected, and no amount of configuration makes them match.

They differ because they measure differently:

• They define a visit and a session differently, and time sessions out at different points.
• Ad and privacy blockers stop some analytics tools and not others.
• Cookie and consent choices affect them differently.
• Each has its own approach to filtering bots and automated traffic.
• Time zones and the boundary of a "day" may not line up.

Differences of tens of percent between two analytics tools are routine across the whole industry.

What to do: pick one tool as your reference and report from it consistently. Use the others for what each is best at. Watch trends over time rather than treating any single number as exact. The direction is reliable even where the absolute figure is not.

If it is still empty

1. Confirm the site is live at the domain you expect.
2. Visit from a phone on mobile data, then check whether that visit was recorded.
3. Widen the date range to the last 30 days and clear all filters.
4. If nothing at all has ever been recorded, contact support with your domain and when you published.