Mountain View, California — Improving site speed is crucially important, and search engine titan Google, which has an economic interest in making the web better because more time spent online means more ads clicked, has finally announced a new component that has been added to the new Google Analytics, the Site Speed report.
The company has recently been concentrating on speed and making the web faster, and its research showed many website owners share the same idea. The feature has been under-wraps for a long time, with variations of it popping-out over recent months and years through Google Webmaster Tools and Labs.
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Their main objective is to deliver a faster web for both users and businesses. It discovered slow loading landing pages have an effect on conversion rate and can impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.
Hence, to optimize page performance, site owners need to measure the speed at which a page loads. Now Google is making it easier to do precisely that.
Now, with the newly released Site Speed report, users can now measure the page load time for each page across their site as various visitors access it, offering an easy way to see which pages needs to be optimized and which are already fast.
Google says, “To enhance the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it is critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.”
According to the company, Google Analytics users can now effortlessly determine how load times impact their ranking at Google, user experience and eventually the conversion rates.
Moreover, loading time tracking needs to be activated before Google begins to collect the numbers, but this will prove very useful to those trying to identify and solve performance problems with their site or server. The company cites four different functions Google Analytics users can perform using the Site Speed Report. Users can apply the Site Speed Report to:
- Content: To find out which landing pages are slowest?
- Traffic Sources: Measure which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
- Visitor: How does page load time differ, with visitor to visitor or from place to place?
- Technology: Does the site load time differ from browser to browser or one OS to another?
Once the source of the problem is diagnosed, users can then perform the necessary improvements or changes need to speed up the loading of those pages that has been taking more time to load.
However, while the newly introduced site speed tool is available to all Google Analytics users, you will need to opt-in and update the Analytics JavaScript code in your webpages. Once the new Analytics code is running on your website, the Site Speed report will rank your pages from those with the highest latency to those with the lowest. To update the code on your site, see the Google Analytics help page.
Site Speed will also list all of the following information:
- Avg Page Load Time: The average amount of time (in seconds) it takes that page to load, from initiation of the pageview (e.g. click on a page link) to load completion in the browser.
- Pageviews: The actual number of times the page was viewed for the selected date range.
- Page Load Sample: The actual number of pageviews that were sampled to calculate the average page load time.
- Bounce Rate: As for Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the only one viewed for the session.
- % Exit: As for the Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the last page in the session.
Furthermore, keep in mind that it is essential to have several hundred pageviews before this information really begins to unfurl a useful story about your site. For smaller websites that may mean waiting a few days before you get a true picture of your load times.
How to set up and use the Site Speed Report?
According to Google, the Site Speed Report feature comes turned-off by default, denoting only 0s in the report. To begin using the feature and measure your website’s load speed, you need to activate and make a little change to the Analytics tracking code as show below in (bold):
Mountain View, California — Improving site speed is crucially important, and search engine titan Google, which has an economic interest in making the web better because more time spent online means more ads clicked, has finally announced a new component that has been added to the new Google Analytics, the Site Speed report.
The company has recently been concentrating on speed and making the web faster, and its research showed many website owners share the same idea. The feature has been under-wraps for a long time, with variations of it popping-out over recent months and years through Google Webmaster Tools and Labs.
Click to enlarge…
Their main objective is to deliver a faster web for both users and businesses. It discovered slow loading landing pages have an effect on conversion rate and can impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.
Hence, to optimize page performance, site owners need to measure the speed at which a page loads. Now Google is making it easier to do precisely that.
Now, with the newly released Site Speed report, users can now measure the page load time for each page across their site as various visitors access it, offering an easy way to see which pages needs to be optimized and which are already fast.
Google says, “To enhance the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it is critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.”
According to the company, Google Analytics users can now effortlessly determine how load times impact their ranking at Google, user experience and eventually the conversion rates.
Moreover, loading time tracking needs to be activated before Google begins to collect the numbers, but this will prove very useful to those trying to identify and solve performance problems with their site or server. The company cites four different functions Google Analytics users can perform using the Site Speed Report. Users can apply the Site Speed Report to:
- Content: To find out which landing pages are slowest?
- Traffic Sources: Measure which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
- Visitor: How does page load time differ, with visitor to visitor or from place to place?
- Technology: Does the site load time differ from browser to browser or one OS to another?
Once the source of the problem is diagnosed, users can then perform the necessary improvements or changes need to speed up the loading of those pages that has been taking more time to load.
However, while the newly introduced site speed tool is available to all Google Analytics users, you will need to opt-in and update the Analytics JavaScript code in your webpages. Once the new Analytics code is running on your website, the Site Speed report will rank your pages from those with the highest latency to those with the lowest. To update the code on your site, see the Google Analytics help page.
Site Speed will also list all of the following information:
- Avg Page Load Time: The average amount of time (in seconds) it takes that page to load, from initiation of the pageview (e.g. click on a page link) to load completion in the browser.
- Pageviews: The actual number of times the page was viewed for the selected date range.
- Page Load Sample: The actual number of pageviews that were sampled to calculate the average page load time.
- Bounce Rate: As for Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the only one viewed for the session.
- % Exit: As for the Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the last page in the session.
Furthermore, keep in mind that it is essential to have several hundred pageviews before this information really begins to unfurl a useful story about your site. For smaller websites that may mean waiting a few days before you get a true picture of your load times.
How to set up and use the Site Speed Report?
According to Google, the Site Speed Report feature comes turned-off by default, denoting only 0s in the report. To begin using the feature and measure your website’s load speed, you need to activate and make a little change to the Analytics tracking code as show below in (bold):
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXX-X’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);
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