Category Archives: Web Analytics

Google Analytics Site Speed

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Google has for a while offered ways of measuring the speed of your website using Google Webmaster Tools and an extension to the Firefox addon Firebug called Page Speed. These are all very well but only let you know 1. how Google experiences the speed of your website and 2. how you experience the speed of your site. What it does not give you is how your visitors experience your website and this is what Google have just added to the new Analytics interface.

This is especially relevant to South African companies choosing to host their websites in the USA to save on hosting costs, but their main audience is a long way off. Being able to measure the site’s load speed and evaluate changes made to the website against these values can only be useful to anyone with the website.

Unfortunately there are some tweaks which need to be made to tracking codes to be able to take advantage of this, but our advice is the sooner this is implemented the sooner you start gathering data for future analysis.

Google Analytics New Features Engagement Goals

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The news that engagement goals are now available in Google Analytics is more than a week old, but the value of it is only apparent once you start applying it to your data (or your client’s data).

Being able to se 20 goals in itself is a limitation which a lot of people were struggling with, but now being able to take the time-on-site as a goal, than evaluate the traffic source, landing page, geographic location… and draw correlations truly drives understanding of a website’s traffic.

Lets say you have an average Pages/Visit of 3.5, what does that mean? In the past you would have to delve into each report to see what the average Pages/Visit were for different segments, and even then averages blur the picture. If you know that last week before xyz changes you had 5% of users meeting the 6 Pages/Visit goal, and this week after the xyz changes that number is 10%, you can easily evaluate performance, where your average may only have changed marginally.