I'm a bit new to this and a total non-techy. Basically the site I work on doesn't currently have much in the way of analytics other than the standard GA reporting and some events as and when reporting has been required by marketing. I come from a background where the site I worked on had a different analytics tool and pretty much every click event or interaction on the site could be reported on. This made it really easy to pull off analytics on any area of the site as and when required in a more proactive way without the need for dev work.
The developers I am working with now are telling me that if we were to put events on the core areas of the site I have asked for (ie core user journeys and key features), it will affect the load times of the pages too much. Could someone advise, 1- is this the case with GA? 2- is there any way around it? 3- is this an issue unique to GA or any analytics tool
This is not an issue with Google Analytics or any web analytics tool. Google code is loaded asynchronously (so it can't block page load) and by the time the events are attached the page is already loaded (else attaching events would hardly be possible).
It might be that your developers are concerned that page performance (not load time, though) suffers when they add a script that has to modify every single DOM element. That argument might have merits (hard to say without knowing your site) but has nothing to do with the analytics tool.
Related
The web-developer don't want to insert Google Analytics code into the website, because he is sure, that it would affect the speed of the website's loading badly, despite the fact that I have pointed at the possibility of using the asynchronous code. What is the real influence of the GA's code on speed of website's loading and working?
How does using of other analytics instruments (for example, Yandex Metrica) on the same site can influence the accuracy or stability of working of Google Analytics? Whether this factor can lower the speed of loading and working of the website in addition?
There are a lot of factors to why or how Google Analytics code may slow down a website. Is it a shared hosting? Where have you placed the analytics code? Did you put it at the top of the pages? Or at the bottom?
Good practise would be to add the analytics code before the </body> tag along with other externally sourced JS.
If Google Analytics code slows down your website, it is highly likely that using other analytics instruments will have the same effect.
You might want to run the website through a site-speed-checker like the one at Pingdom or Google's own to see whether it's the analytics code, or something else like bad compression (if you're not using gzip compression) or high-res uncompressed images etc that are actually slowing down your website.
It is also probably a good idea to test both with the analytics code and without to see if there is a significant change in load time. And please do it for multiple simultaneous requests and not just a single request. If you can provide this data, it might be helpful in understanding what's going on!
Hope this helps!
EDIT: Removed question about servers bandwidth based on comment from Eike Pierstorff!
Well, the question is in the title. I searched SO (obviously) but nothing similar came up. Additional reading material (if you happen to know one) will be helpful to solve this mystery for me.
No, not by default at least.
It is technically possible to contrive a serverside solution that measures referenced assets. But usually (i.e. when you use the javascript tracking code) Google Analytics will only measure documents that have the tracking code embedded. Since you cannot embed javascript code in image files they will not be tracked.
If you want to see which images have been called from other domains you can instead have a look in your webservers access logs which keeps track of all requests to your server and usually includes the address of the referring site.
I have a website that has a landing page built and hosted on a website development platform (Wix). I have no control over the code, and to use Google Analytics I can only input the Property code and it's automatically implemented. The thing is that they still use ga.js, and the rest of my website, hosted in my own server, uses analytics.js.
I thought about using different properties, but then I wouldn't have the data all in one place.
Is it possible to consolidate the data? If not, what is the best way to deal with it?
Thanks.
==== [EDIT] New info.
Thanks MarkeD and Marcel Dumont. Using ga.js with another property seems to be the way to go, but there's another issue. The landing page in Wix is the www subdomain, and when the user goes to my server it goes to another subdomain, so I'd have to add "pageTracker._setDomainName('mydomain.com');" to the Wix page tracking code, which can't be done.
Any new ideas?
Thanks again.
Afraid that out-of-the-box there is no satisfiable solution for your issue.
You cannot use the old and new method within one profile, and there is no method to consolidate data across two profiles.
Even if you would put in a lot of efforts use the APIs to manually query and consolidate both profile data into your own Database/Dataware house you would still face problems with the inability to add visitor/visit data together.
As workaround, why not run old-style GA next to your Universal Analytics on the rest of the website? not ideal to use old-style, but at least that will give you overall data.
The old ga.js will still send data to a Universal Analytics property, so you could run both into the same account, once it is upgraded to Universal Analytics.
Google reference on upgrading from ga.js and analytics.js
Note that the reference states if you have ga.js and analytics.js on the page, it will double count. (i.e. data is sent with both)
So I would put the same UA code on your Wix as your ga.js main website, and use as normal. The data will be a bit more flaky as the sessions are calculated slightly differently under the two scripts, but when Wix finally upgrades to ga.js that should sort itself out.
I'd like to track the activity per user and know how they interact with the different options and try to track all the possible clicks performed by a user.
At best would like to use a third party tool instead to create a tracking system from scratch, that definitely will boost my project development because that's a core part of my system.
I think that google analytics can perform such tasks but I can't go into that level of detail per user.
I'm using C# / ASP.NET MVC 4
thanks
Google Analytics (free version) does not let you view data on indivual visitor basis, only aggregated reports. The only way would be to store a unique id per visitor as a custom var and segment by that variable, which would be hugely inconvenient, would quite possibly violate Googles TOS and would still not quite work the way you want to.
You could for example install Piwik (if you're on PHP/Mysql) - that's an open source tracking package that, while it's pretty much useless for ad campaign management, is a halfway decent way to track how visitors move around on your site (plus, you have access to the raw data). Be aware that Piwik doesn't scale well, you'll need a lot of hardware for a big site.
I have created a widget that is being hosted on a number of websites. I originally implemented the code using only jquery and JSONP to buid the widget. Upon implementing the widget on live webiste though we had the unfortunate experience of that other widgets which were on the site already had really poor javascript in them which killed our widget, so to cut a long story short I have created a second version which works using an IFrame. I have read up on the google analytics site that you can track usage in an IFrame fairly easily, but is there any way that I could track the usage of the original, iframeless version using Google Analytics. I could of course simply have an app on my side which counts the number of time the webservice I'm using to render the widget is called, and count the number of referrals on my site, but this seams like re-inventing the wheel when we already have Google Ananlytics to do this.
I don't think it's reinventing the wheel since Google Analytics is not designed to do this.
The advantage of having an iframe is that the content of the iframe is on your site, and thus under your control. With your plugin on the wild everything you do is shared with the global page namespace and in the same manner the other extension killed yours, your extension could have killed others.
If you implement analytics on your extension you could be impacting the site very heavily if it also uses Google Analytics.
Multiple trackers on a single page is tricky in Analytics. It's possible but not very well supported and not recommended by Google.
The problem happens when you have conflicting Google Analytics settings with the other trackers on the page. Since you're sharing the same cookies both tracker configurations must be compatible.
eg:
If one uses _setAllowHash and the other does not the cookies will be reset for each time a pageview is fired, possibly breaking both implementations pretty badly.
So if you have other means to track your extension go for it. Try to use Google Analytics only on your domain, so you're free to go if you're doing it inside your iframe, otherwise try to avoid it.
If you can update the other extensions that are out there, why not just replace it with the iframe versions of it?