Feature Guide

Connection Health

If your website ever stops sending data, you find out from us — not from an empty chart.

The quiet failure mode of every analytics tool is the same: a site update, a theme change, or a redesign removes the tracking snippet, and nobody notices until someone opens the dashboard weeks later and finds a gap. Those visitors were real, but they were never counted — and that data cannot be recovered.

Crafty Meerkat watches for this automatically. If a website that normally sends us data goes quiet for more than two days, we email you with what happened and a two-minute fix. When data starts flowing again, we email you an all-clear — no need to keep checking.

You can also check the connection yourself any time. The Check Connection button in Site Settings looks at your website from our servers and tells you, in plain language, whether the snippet is still installed and data is arriving.

How it works

Every hour, we compare each site’s recent activity to its own history. A site that was receiving steady visits and then goes completely silent for 48 hours almost always means the snippet was removed — so that is when we email you. Brand-new sites that have not sent data yet are handled by the install guide instead, and a normal quiet stretch on a low-traffic site will not trigger a false alarm.

The Check Connection button does a live inspection: we confirm when your last visit arrived, then fetch your homepage from our servers and look for your tracking snippet with your exact Site Key. If the snippet is missing, you will know within seconds — along with exactly how to put it back.

Step by step

1
Open Site Settings → Install Snippet
The connection panel sits at the top of the install section. Green means connected — it shows when your last visit arrived and how many page views came in over the past day.
2
Press Check Connection
We fetch your website from our side and verify the snippet is present with the correct Site Key. The result appears right below the button, in plain language.
3
If the snippet is missing, reinstall it
Copy the snippet from the install guide on the same page and add it back — just before the closing </head> tag, or via your platform’s plugin or code-injection setting. Then visit your site in a new tab and check again.
4
Watch for the all-clear email
Once data resumes, the alert clears itself and we email you a confirmation. The quiet period will show as a gap in your charts — that is expected, not something to fix.

Tips from the den

◆After any site redesign, theme change, or platform migration, press Check Connection once. It takes seconds and catches the single most common way analytics silently breaks.
◆The alert email means visitors are not being counted — it never means your website is down. Uptime Monitoring watches for that separately.
◆If you removed the snippet on purpose, you can simply ignore the alert. We only email once per outage.

Common questions

Why did I get a “stopped sending data” email?

Your website had been sending us visitor data regularly and then went completely quiet for more than two days. In almost every case the tracking snippet was removed during a site update or redesign. The email links straight to your install guide, and the fix takes about two minutes.

Can the missed visitors be recovered?

No — analytics can only count visits while the snippet is on the page, which is why we watch the connection and alert you quickly. The gap stays in your charts as an honest record; everything after the fix is counted normally.

Will a slow week on my site trigger a false alarm?

No. The check compares your site to its own history and only alerts when a previously steady stream of visits stops completely. A quiet stretch on a low-traffic site does not qualify.

The Check Connection button says my site is unreachable, but it loads fine for me. What now?

Some hosts and firewalls block automated checks like ours while serving normal visitors without issue. That makes the snippet check inconclusive rather than failed — verify the old-fashioned way: view your page source in the browser and search for craftymeerkat.