Google Analytics enabling Site Speed Report for all users

Google Analytics offers a wide range of advanced features and reports, one of the newest being the Site Speed report, introduced in May 2011. Upon first glance many marketing professionals might want to dismiss Site Speed as just another technical report by engineers, for engineers.

Yet users do prefer fast sites: numerous studies (e.g slide 4) have demonstrated site page load time to be a determining factor in the success of a site.

Web marketing practitioners should also bear in mind that Google introduced landing page loading time as an AdWords quality score factor in 2008 and as a SEO ranking factor in 2010.

Data now showing up in many Google Analytics profiles, but no official announcement just yet

Initially the Google Analytics Site Speed report was visible by default in the Google Analytics interface (unlike some other advanced reports such as ecommerce and site search which aren’t even visible) but actual data collection required an additional of a piece of code, _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']); to be inserted in web pages with the Google Analytics tracking code (the syntax differs slightly depending on the version of tracking code in use). Indeed, Google analytics site speed not working is one of the more popular Google searches according to Google Suggest.

Around November 10 2011 Google started to populate the Site Speed report for some Google Analytics profiles even if the GA tracking code hadn’t been modified. There hasn’t yet been any official announcement of this change, but the Google Analytics code debugger displays the following message:

(Method _trackPageLoadTime is deprecated. _trackPageLoadTime is deprecated. Site Speed tracking is enabled by default with trackPageview call at 1% sampling. Use _setSiteSpeedSampleRate for changing sample rate.)

The display of this message seems premature; not even the Google Analytics tracking code page load time documentation reflects this change, nor is there any mention of _setSiteSpeedSampleRate in the tracking code API documentation. The warning only appears in the browser agnostic debugger, it doesn’t show up in the chrome extension.

Once Google does enable site speed for all sites, it is recommend that sites remove _trackPageLoadTime from their tracking code.

Updated 2011-11-15

1. added note about Google Site Speed Not Working as common GA user search
2. Phil Mui, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics, says:
3. The official Google Analytics announcement was made on 18 November 2011.

Similar Posts:

• Google Analytics Event Tracking – New Option to Avoid Impacting Bounce Rate
• Flash is still a problem for SEO (and the web) despite Google announcement
• Use events to track 404 page not found errors in Google Analytics
• Web Analytics Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code: Place at the top or bottom of the page?
• Google Analytics v5 is promising, yet with many lost features feels unfinished

Registration is now open for the next SEO Course (March 22 and 23) and Google Analytics Course (March 14 and 15) in Milan. Don’t miss the opportunity!