I'm using Google Analytics to track Page Load Times, but the most visited page has an Avg. Page Load Time of Zero. It also has a Page Load Sample of Zero. How is this possible given that it gets more traffic than the other pages and the other pages have non-zero values? How do I get the Avg. Page Load Time and the Page Load Sample to not be zero?
Page Load Times
The Page Load Sample is zero, so the report has dismissed all views to that particular page, so all other measurements are zeroed out either.
I'm not quite sure but I think sampling is by user/client id, so if the same user has viewed the page a lot of times the pageviews might be sampled out completely.
In any case, you should try to increase the site speed sample rate. Per default it's one percent, and on a site with few visitors that might not be enough to get a representative sample. There is a cap (at max. 10 000 measurements or 1%, whatever happens first) but for a smaller site you should use a bigger sample.
Related
I have some problem with google analytics. In the Google Ads campaign report, the number of clicks is six times higher than the number of sessions. I have no idea why.
https://imgur.com/a/nENMVbx
Usually a discrepancy is physiological, however that indicated in the image is actually a bit high.
It could depend, for example, on the slow loading of pages or on the loss of the gclic parameter (for example in the case of redirects) or on an error on the site that blocks tracking.
What exactly is the metric "Avg. Page Load Time" in Google Analytics?
I would expect it to mean the same thing as "Avg. Document Content Loaded Time (sec)":
"Average time (in seconds) that the browser takes to parse the document and execute deferred and parser-inserted scripts (DOMContentLoaded), including the network time from the user's location to your server."
"Avg. Page Load Time" is described as:
Google Analytics Help says that it is "Avg. Page Load Time is the average amount of time (in seconds) it takes for pages from the sample set to load, from initiation of the pageview (e.g. click on a page link) to load completion in the browser. If you see zero (0) as a value or a small increase in November 2011, read the About Site Speed article."
... but what exactly is "load completion"?
The reason I'm trying to sort this out is a > 4x difference in "Document Content Loaded Time" and "Page Load Time" ... but when I render it in my browser I'm not seeing anything that takes nearly that long.
Essentially the speed analytics are measuring different points in the timeline, Average page load time is the whole load time including all parts of the timeline and Document content loaded time is just a small part of the time line.
The speed you see reflected in the stats and the actual experience you get can be due to a number of factors, They can include redirects and serverside processing and scripts loading in the background all things you dont really see or experience.
I defined a Site Speed Sample Rate of 100% (via the Google Tag Manager). It's definitely more than 1% now but far from 100%. In fact a comparison of the speed samples and real pageviews in GA shows, that the rate is at constant 25% now. Our page has about 10,0000 users per day. Every page includes the same simple tag.
Any ideas what could be wrong? Thanks!
Site speed hits are sampled on the server as well as the client. You may be running into the limits outlined here:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-timings#sampling
In fact a comparison of the speed samples and real pageviews in GA shows, that the rate is at constant 25% now.
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. I don't think there's any reliable way to know what percentage of hits were sent from looking at reports.
The best way to test whether 100% of hits are being sent is to inspect the network tab in your browser's developer tools. If you set siteSpeedSampleRate to 100, you should be able to clear your cookies, refresh the page, and see timing hits being sent. If you repeat this (making sure to clear cookies), you should see hits being sent 100% of the time.
Although setting siteSpeedSampleRate to 100 will indeed send speed data every time, you might be hitting one of the site speed processing quotas:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/limits-quotas#timing_hits
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-timings#sampling_considerations
I am successfully tracking traffic on a site (so far over 150 hits), however the Site Speed is still showing all zeroes. I know that the default is to only calculate speed for 1% of the requests, but it seems that nothing is getting tracked at all for Site Speed. I'm using the newest version of Chrome.
Any ideas? Thanks!
Site speed sample rate sets the percentage of users to be tracked not the percentage of requests. Here's what the docs say:
This setting determines how often site speed tracking beacons will be sent. By default, 1% of users will be automatically be tracked. Note: Analytics restricts Site Speed collection hits for a single property to the greater of 1% of users or 10K hits per day in order to ensure an equitable distribution of system resources for this feature.
In your case, if you don't expect to have more than 10K hits to your property in a single day, you can safely set the sample rate to 100%. Note: this has to be done in the create method:
ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', {'siteSpeedSampleRate': 100});
Have you called the _setSightSpeedSampleRate() method? That would be my best guess. According to the Google docs:
The _setSiteSpeedSampleRate() method must be called prior to _trackPageview() in order to be effective.
I am using Google Web Analytics Online Tool to monitor visits on my site.
What bugs me is that often I see that records contain the folloowing entries:
Page Visits: 1.00
Average Visit Duration: 00:00:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
What does that mean?
If the visitor comes to my site it should stay at least couple of seconds until he leaves?
Could that mean that something is wrong with accessing my site (I had similar problems before, but I am convinced I fixed them since I am not getting any errors when I try to access my site from different computers.)
When a visitor comes to your page google analytics sets a cookie where a timestamp is stored. When the user visits a second page in your site Google compares the stored timestamp to the actual time and calculates visits duration from the difference between the two. If all your visitors have bounced there is no second data point to compare the stored value to and google is unable to compute a duration.
A common workaround is to set a javascript timeout and trigger an event after ten seconds or so (with the "interaction" flag in the event set to true, see Google Analytics event tracking docs for details). The assumption is that somebody who looks for more than ten seconds at you page is not actually a bounce (I think that since "bounce rate" has so hugely negative connotations people try to avoid high bounce rates even at the price of introducing bad data; you should realize that "bounce rate" simply means that there are not enough data points to say anything meaningful about those particular visitors).
Personally I do not like that approach because it means to redefine inaction of a visitor as action. A better idea (IMO) is to implement a meaningful interaction point - like a "read more" link that loads content via ajax or something like it - and track that via event tracking or virtual page view.
Event tracking guide:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide
Short Update: With Universal Analytics the technical details have changed (i.e. there are no longer cookies with timestamps, all information is processed on the GA servers). So the first paragraph is no longer up to date, however the rest of the answer is still valid.
I'm having a similar issue, i monitor those placements and recently found out the traffic is hardly getting to my site, recent experiment showed that those are placements triggered via clicks from GDN, but people have not even reached my page, were blocked by pop-up blocker or other similar software