Today, we talk about site speed in Universal Analytics, but it's also worth getting up to speed on the site speed changes within Google Analytics 4.
BEHAVIOR:Â What did a visitor do on our website?
Well, it turns out that they could have done a lot of things, and we can track most of them in Google Analytics.
One of the basic things to track is page views. And we can actually learn a lot from knowing which pages are being viewed, and how often.
For more advance tracking of visitors' activities and behavior, we'll need to do more configuration on Google Analytics.
SITE SPEED: Is your site more like a Tortoise or Usain Bolt?
I've experienced sites which takes up to 20 minutes to load. And that's terrible UX no doubt.
Site speed in Google Analytics collects data on how fast your website loads. It's capturing the time taken to load, from the first line of code on your website, to the last.
By default, Google Analytics tracks 1% of your total visitors randomly. This can be quite a small sample size. And thus the data is less reliable. Read on to find out how we can fix that.
Intermediate. Some configuration is needed before you'll be able to collect data on the speed of your site.
1. Increasing the sample size of visits you're tracking will make your data more reliable. The default is randomly tracking 1% of your visitors, and you can dial that up to 100%, or anything in between.
There is a possibility that by tracking a (too) large sample size, your site might run into trouble. Google Analytics do cap the amount on how many visits you can track. But typically, most users need not to worry about this.
2. There are actually better and more sophisticated programs for tracking site speed. Site speed on Google Analytics may not be the best option. Particularly because issues like poor internet connection on user end can affect the data. Issues like this can skew your data.
Want to know more about the Periodic Table of Google Analytics? Visit here for more information.
