Google Analytics Real Time Data Lagging & Buggy

There are countless complaints across the forums and social media that Google Analytics real time data is lagging and not reporting accurately. It seems like those complaints are legit after checking a number of sites.

So instead of seeing the normal number of real time visitors in the GA4 real time reports, you are seeing a smaller percentage of them being reported.

Here is a sample real time report that seems to reporting a small percentage of traffic from what it normally shows:

This seems like a bug, but Google has not responded to the complaints about this issue yet.

I just wanted to post this to say those of you noticing this drop in real time traffic reported in Google Analytics – you are not alone. It seems like there is currently something clogging the reporting pipes and hopefully Google will fix it soon.

Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld and plenty of other places.