You may be aware that Microsoft released a new version of Edge on January 15, but since that time you haven’t seen any of that Edge traffic in your Google Analytics reports. So perhaps you wonder what’s going on and if it was a upgrade where is all the traffic gone?
At the same time, you may be seeing a decline in your Edge cohort week over week, and depending on how many of Edge users upgraded that decline could be severe.
So what’s going on? Where did all the Edge users go?
They are still there. You can’t see them because Google Analytics didn’t update the parser to understand the new user agent strings.
If you are capturing the User Agent string (full) in a Custom Dimension you can easily see this in the BigQuery data export (assuming GA360). Look at the following Desktop user agent:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.74 Safari/537.36 Edg/79.0.309.43" Google Analytics identifies this user agent as Chrome – because it does not correctly acknowledge the Edg token.
The story is the same on Mobile Devices.
For those that installed Edge on iOS their user agent looks like:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.2.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14F89 Safari/603.2.4 EdgiOS/41.1.35.1
The EdgiOS token in the above string is presently being parsed by Google Analytics as Safari.
For those whom have installed Edge on Android:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.0; Pixel XL Build/OPP3.170518.006) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/41.1.35.1
The EdgA token is presently being parsed as Chrome.
So the impact to reporting is you will have lower Edge traffic, and higher Chrome / Safari traffic than is actual. This trend will reverse once they fix the parser.
I have provided Google with multiple examples of the above, and I know there is a ticket open with the Engineering team. I do not have a estimated time for a fix, but wanted to get the word out for those who look at traffic slices by browser in the mean time.