New Google Analytics Site Speed Analytics Report

Posted by kirsty on May 6, 2011 in Blog, Web Analytics | 91 comments

As you are probably by now aware, the latest report announced in the new Google Analytics is all about Site Speed. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

Now you can find out which pages are loading slowly, how your site’s load times are affecting expensive advertising channels, and the correlation between load times and conversion rates.

Uses for the Site Speed Report

• Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers.

By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code.

Make the change here:

<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

See detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center.

The page load measurement in the Site Speed report starts from the user click and includes loading of the elements on a page. It uses the W3C’s NavigationTiming spec.

For the original blog post, click here.