Help on Page Load Time
-
I'm trying to track page load time of the visits on my site and GA only says to me that it's equal to zero and page load sample is aways zero too.
I've made a research, and I found that GA is used to track page load time automatically, isn't it?
-
I would definitely make sure you look at what Google is saying https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiBasicConfiguration#gat.GA_Tracker._setSiteSpeedSampleRate
your Google analytics code is the newest version "asynchronous tracking code" it does make a difference in speed. If you want to track your websites loading speed from certain areas or get a general idea of what you can do to speed it up I strongly recommend http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-html-site-page-load-check-tool.aspx both will allow you to check the sites load time from different areas in the United States and the world. If you want to have your site load faster than it does now and you're using Word press I would recommend a different host somebody like WPengine.com or http://page.ly/ if you are using any other form of website you can use a content delivery network somebody like http://www.akamai.com/ does a great job I also use http://www.limelight.com/website-application-acceleration/ for a more complete look at your website load speed and analytics I would recommend Adobe's Omniture http://www.omniture.com/en/ they are more expensive obviously then the free suite from Google however I believe you will see that you do get what you pay for. I also want to bring up Kiss metrics analytics they are only $30 a month and will allow you to track the speed of particular individuals here is a bit of information on the subject from their blog http://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ as well as their main page you can sign up for a free month trial https://www.kissmetrics.com/new_feature
Here is Googles advice on what to do
_setSiteSpeedSampleRate()
_setSiteSpeedSampleRate(sampleRate)
Defines a new sample set size for Site Speed data collection. By default, a fixed 1% sampling of your site visitors make up the data pool from which the Site Speed metrics are derived. If you have a relatively small number of daily visitors to your site, such as 100,000 or fewer, you might want to adjust the sampling to a larger rate. This will provide increased granularity for page load time and other Site Speed metrics. (See Site Speed in the Help Center for details about the Site Speed reports.)
The
_setSiteSpeedSampleRate()
method must be called prior to_trackPageview()
in order to be effective.Analytics restricts Site Speed collection hits for a single property to the greater of 1% of visitors or 10K hits per day in order to ensure an equitable distribution of system resources for this feature.
Note: We strongly encourage sites with greater than 1 million hits per day to keep their sample selection set to the default 1% rate. Adjusting the sample size to a larger number will not increase your sample size.
Async Snippet (recommended)
_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 5]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
<a class="exw-control exw-expanded">▾</a>
Traditional (ga.js) Snippet
pageTracker._setSiteSpeedSampleRate(5); pageTracker._trackPageview();
parameters
_Number_ sampleRate
Value between 0 - 100 to define the percentage of visitors to your site that will be measured for Site Speed purposes. For example, a value of5
sets the Site Speed collection sample to 5%.I hope I was of help to you and wish you luck with this.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
QuiZick Internet Marketing
-
Thank you, but it seems that GA is not tracking page load time at all.
I use the new asynchronous tracking code, it's supposed to do it automatically, right?
Sometimes it show one or two results, but almost everything is ZERO.
It's making me confused.
-
New tracking codes set this up as default but if this is an old code it will need enabling
by using the folowing
Previous versions of Site Speed required a tracking code change to add _trackPageLoadTime. Sites with the deprecated call will still collect speed data at the 10% sampling rate. However, this call will be ignored in the future, and the sample rate will fall to the default 1%. Consider updating your tracking code to use setSiteSpeedSampleRate() to set a higher sampling rate.
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page Rank on Moz compared to Ahrefs
So there seems to be a huge philosophical difference behind how Moz and Ahrefs calculates page rank (PA). On Moz, PA is very dependent on a site's DA. For instance, any new page or page with no backlinks for a 90DA site on Moz will have around 40PA. However, if a site has around 40 DA, any new page or page with no backlinks will have around 15PA PA. Now if one were to decide to get tons of backlinks to this 40 DA/15PA page, that will raise the PA of the page slightly, but it will likely never go beyond 40PA....which hints that one would rather acquire a backlink from a page on a high DA site even if that page has 0 links back to it as opposed to a backlink from a page on a low DA site with many, many backlinks to it. This is very different from how Ahrefs calculates PA. For Ahrefs, the PA of any new page or page with no backlinks to it will have a PA of around 8-10ish....no matter what the DA of the site is. When a page from a 40DA site begins acquiring a few links to it, it will quickly acquire a higher PA than a page from a 90DA site with no links to it. The big difference here is that for Ahrefs, PA for a given page is far more dependent on how many inbound links that page has. On the other hand, for Moz, PA for a given page is far more dependent on the DA of the site that page is on. If we were to trust Moz's PA calculations, SEOrs should emphasize getting links from high DA sites....whereas if we were to trust Ahref's PA calculations, SEOrs should focus less on that and more on building links to whatever page they want to rank up (even if that page is on a low DA site). So what do you guys think? Do you agree more with Moz or Ahref's valuation of PA. Is PA of a page more dependent on the DA or more dependent on it's total inbound links?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
Page content is not very similar but topic is same: Will Google considers the rel canonical tags?
Hi Moz community, We have multiple pages from our own different sub-domains for same topics. These pages even rank in SERP for related keywords. Now we are planning to show only one of the pages in SERP. We cannot redirect unfortunately. We are planning to use rel canonical tags. But the page content is not same, only 20% is similar and 80% is different but the context is same. If we use rel canonicals, does Google accepts this? If not what should I do? Making header tags similar works? How Google responds if content is not matching? Just ignore or any negative score? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking impact: Traffic in website pages vs sub directory vs sub domain
Hi all, I need clarification on this. Not every time website main pages rank, some times even pages from sub directories or sub domains like blogs or guides; especially for branded keywords. I just wonder what happens when so much traffic is generating in sub directories and sub domains just because of limited landing pages in main website. Will this traffic be counted as traffic in main website as per Google? Traffic increase in main website really an ranking factor? Will the "brand + topic" related keywords' traffic is more for a website; will it ranking improves even for "topic keywords"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do pages with canonicals need meta data?
Page A has a canonical to Page B. Should Page A have meta data values such as description, keywords, dublin core values, etc.? If yes, should the meta data values be different on Page A and Page B?
Algorithm Updates | | Shirley.Fenlason1 -
Lost over 65% of organic visits since Sept - Please help
Hi all, I'm fairly new to SEOmoz, i am here because i dont seem to be getting any actuall help from my SEO company, so am trying to figure this out myself. I have done a quick analysis using google analytics and have gone from 13441 google organic visitors in Sept to 4527 google organic visitors in March. (see attached image GA Sept - March) Visitor numbers seems be to fairly stable in sept, oct, nov, and perhaps a slight decline in Dec, but then on Jan17th seems a big drop, and i have never recovered... (See images GA - Oct, GA - Nov, GA - Dec and GA - Jan ) I am at a bit of a loss, i have heard about google penalties, but there are no warnings in my webmaster tools about this, the only warning i ever got was a message on Dec 24th which read : http://XXX.co.uk/: Big traffic change for top URL Search results clicks for (my site) have decreased significantly. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates. However, if you have recently made significant changes to the content or configuration of your site, this change may be an indication that there are problems. This is not a penalty notice is it? its simply google telling me i have lost a lot of traffic? Strange thing is December's traffic was pretty much fine, so do not understand why i got this message, when the drop in traffic happened a month later. I've been racking my brain for months trying to fix every little possible issue i can find with my site (its not nice, when you do not actually know what google has decided it doesn't like about your site!) but nothing seems to be helping, i've been hiring content writter's as i found loads of websites have copied a lot of content, i also decided maybe the product descriptions are being classed as duplicate so again have got in content writter's to re-write hundreds of product descriptions (all this is costing me an arm and a leg)... Nada! Then today, when doing this google analysis (see image GA Sept - March) i noticed two sites, i have renamed them on the image to: XXX-1.co.uk & XXX-2.ecomm-search.com XXX-1.co.uk was a test server where i could play around with code on my website before i actually implement changes, usually i delete all the files after i use it... but it looks like i forgot to do that.... the site is a complete copy of my website (but obviously a version where you can not actually process an order) but all the pages still have canonical links back to the proper website... Just in case this was causing issues, i have 301 redirected the site back to my main site... Is this wise? or should i just delete the site? XXX-2.ecomm-search.com is a search company i was trialing as i wanted to improve the search functionality on my own site, however the search features are hosted on their site... I was told it has no bearing on SEO as its not indexed... however if google is seeing refferalls coming from that site, which is basically a duplicate of my search pages but with better functionality, could they be considering this a duplicate content issue? If anybody can give me any advice at all about above questions, or in general about what happened on Jan 17th (as i see from web search's many people were affected but i can not seem to find people who actually know what google did) i would be very grateful. Thanks James iNiKRDq jd6FJ3l RzaqTEy 8KCtykz 2m2OGvG
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
Why do in-site search result pages rank better than my product pages?
Maybe this is a common SERP for a generic product type but I'm seeing it a lot more often. Here is an example SERP "rolling stools". The top 4 results are dynamic in-site search pages from Sears, ebay and Amazon (among others). I understand their influence and authority but why would a search return a dynamic in-site SERP instead of a solid product page. A better question would be - How do I get my in-site SERPs to rank or how do I get my client's page to rise above the #5 spot is currently ranks at? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BenRWoodard0 -
You folks see the Google Analytics Real Time View (Beta)
I was pretty impressed by the amount of data they can present to you and how quickly the site gets it to you. Hit your GA account click the Home tab then click the Real Time (Beta) link in the navigation. It is pretty impressive. GoogleAnalytics.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | donford0