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.
Related
Environment: injected Google Analytics tracking in my SharePoint Online site - all good.
Now I have been clicking pages for more than an hour and wanted to check results. I see that tracking is working (see screenshot) - at that moment there was one active user (me) and have >30 page views in a 30min time window.
Problem: reports (user and page view count) seem to be empty, but I assume that there should be at least one user and multiple page view information. Is that correct or I am misusing Google Analytics?
Update:
Pressed "Refresh Report" and Google fetched new data. Unfortunately, nothing changed and data still is empty.
This report was generated on 12/04/2019 at 16:17:25
The time of when the report was generated is not reflective of how "fresh" the data is. For the free version of GA, there is no SLA and it can take upwards of 2 days, but generally under 24 hours. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7084038?hl=en
Seeing the user in realtime doesn't mean the data for the reports are updated. You need to be patient and wait.
If you're seeing data in the real time reports then the standard reports should populate. This can take time though in my experience the latency is usually less than 1 hour. Are you looking at the standard reports in an entirely unfiltered view - might be worth checking to see if any filters are impacting your data though they should effect the real time reports as well.
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.
We're implementing Google Analytics in retail consumer kiosk software. There is no Javascript or SDKs or web pages involved - we craft a URL per Measurement Protocol and post it. We find that sometimes hits seem to just stop getting counted. If we watch the Real-Time section on the GA web site we can see that our hits continue to get posted, but over in the Behavior / Screens section the number of screen views for this device for today stops incrementing.
It's not just a "sometimes you have to wait 24 hours" thing, because Tuesday and Wednesday of last week still show zero today. If it's a rate limit, I can't see what - we're nowhere near 200k hits per day (per user, but from our point of view each kiosk is a user - we don't have any means to identify individual users); we shouldn't be hitting 500 hits per session because we send a session start (ec=Session&sc=Start) each time the user does something on the main menu and a session end (ec=Session&sc=End) each time the workflow finishes, which shouldn't ever be more than 20 screens - the default 'idle timeout' definition of a session wouldn't work well for us since a user can legitimately be working on a single screen for 10 minutes or more editing a picture whereas also a user can finish and leave and the next user in line start using the kiosk within just a few seconds; we shouldn't be sending events 'too fast' because it takes a couple seconds for a human to read the screen and reach out and touch a button.
What we observe is that some days it counts up to 340-360 and stops and some days it stays at 0 permanently. Any idea what's happening and how to fix it?
11/24: Today it went up to 352 and then stopped. This was about one hour of activity. All of this has been done with "Highest precision" selected.
12/1: Still same, counts for about one hour, to 347 screen views today, then stops incrementing.
When I look at Audience/Overview it says "Sessions 1". There should be dozens of sessions, split up by when we send (ec=Session&sc=Start). I think it must not be recognizing that as a session, it must be using the session timeout (idle), and staying all within a single session, and therefore limiting to 500 hits (we've got some events to go along with the screen views). And this is just wrong. Session should end when we say it does.
12/1: One correction, we actually do send sc=start and sc=end, with the values lower-case, as specified by Google.
My coworker did some experimenting and found that sc=start is ignored on t=event hits. It is recognized on t=pageview hits. I changed my reporting a bit to generate a fake pageview when a session starts, just so I could send the sc=start, and now the counts are accurate.
Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.
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