Page load time google analytics

By Justin Jones Last updated Nov 11, 2022

Page load time google analytics: In Google Analytics, there is a metric called Page Value that is rarely used by marketing teams. As soon as you start analyzing your website’s content, you may find it to be a strong tool.

Google Analytics Goal Values and Ecommerce data are used to compute Page Value. In this way, you can identify which pages on your site are most beneficial to your visitors. It’s common for an online store to have a higher page value for its product pages than its resource pages.

An effective lead generation landing page is identical to its counterpart on the homepage of the same website. When comparing a high-level homepage to a landing page, we find that landing pages often generate more page value.

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Page load time google analytics

You can find out more about Goal Value by reading our post on Google Analytics Goal Setup.

By comparing Page Value to the average time it takes a page to load, you can get the most out of it.

Analytics Ninja’s clients are increasingly looking for ways to improve page speed in 2019. The quantity of articles and talks delivered at conferences about the importance of having a speedy website suggests that the marketing industry is particularly focused on this issue. As many studies have shown, having a fast-loading website will put your business in a better position to make money more rapidly than one that takes longer to load

A follow-up post to this blog post will analyze how page speed affects the effectiveness of a company’s operations based on information from our own clients. To be able to answer the question “Does page load speed important, and if yes, how much?” we must first be able to accurately analyze page load speed.

Inspiration and Initial Thoughts

Most individuals who visit this site are already aware that Google Analytics offers a wide range of Site Speed measures. Then why isn’t it good enough, you ask? So, I’ll try to explain.

By default, Google Analytics only records page time hits from 1% of all views. This is the key reason for this. Changing siteSpeedSampleRate to 100% in the code will allow Google Analytics to process up to ten thousand timing hits every day, but this may be increased to 100% by making a small alteration in the code. This suggests that for medium- to large-sized websites, there is a significant amount of data sampling taken on in your page load measurements.

This issue has been debated and attempted to be resolved by members of the digital analytics community for many years. Simo Ahava (2013), Joe Christopher (2011) (2017).

The two blogs that truly got my eye and have provided motivation for client-based work that I’ll be sharing in this article are: Both Dan Wilkerson’s 2016 post on raising the GA Pagespeed Hit Limit and Jenn Kunz’s 2019 piece on optimizing performance timing in Adobe products can be found here and here respectively. The next paragraphs will go into greater detail about these two posts.

So what’s the deal with page load time?

I’ve found that many individuals make the mistake of placing too much attention on a statistic known as “Page Load Time” while trying to figure out how long it takes for a page to load. There’s nothing wrong with using “Average Page Load Time” as the default page speed metric in Google Analytics because of the name and the fact that “Average Page Load Time” is the default page speed metric. To compound the confusion over page speed, “Average Page Load Time” is the default page speed measurement in Google Analytics.

However, the image (and the measures linked with it) become significantly more convoluted and subtle when we try to characterize the impact of loading a page on the user experience.

Enter the browser’s Performance Timing API.

Access to a substantial amount of information about the time taken for everything that happens during the loading of a page is available through the Performance Timing API. By putting performance. timing into the browser console, you can see what the API returns. For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the term, here is an explanation.

As a result, you will see that each value supplied uses a UNIX timestamp as its measuring system. These data are extremely useful since they allow you to see how long it took the browser to render each stage of the website. This comes in very helpful. A custom metric is used by the company to record timing information for most of Analytics Ninja’s customers that utilize Google Analytics.

Sending the data to Google Analytics is a simple process thanks to GTM. For each non-interactive event (or a selection of pages, if that’s what you want), you can simply create an HTML tag that includes the calculated statistics from the previous paragraphs as custom metrics.

Data that is delivered to the Event Tag will also provide useful information for the study. (Again, I’d want to send a shout-out to Dan, who came up with many of the concepts that inspired this piece.) I use a lookup table in GTM to map page load speed figures to strings by padding the string with a leading zero and using the GTM API. This enables the GA user interface to support alphabetic sorting.

The performance. timing object’s timing fields can only be accessed by running this tag on the gtm. load event in order to use the GTM triggers’ timing fields. The page must first finish loading before you can enter a value in the “Load End” field.

Also, I added a couple of blocking triggers to the tag to keep the data cleaner; one that only allows positive numbers (someone smarter than me will hopefully and a blog comment below explaining how the amount of time captured in the browser could be negative), and the other that limits page load speed to 120,000 milliseconds so that outliers don’t completely wreck averages to the extent that we will analyze. So that we can better compare averages, this has been done.

Why use the custom metrics? Isn’t Total Page Load Time as bucketed in the Event Action enough?

This is why I decided to use capture data such as the Time to DOM Interactive instead of the final Page Load event, which is less accurate (the point at which your browser will begin to respond to inputs such as scrolling, tapping, or clicking). Because I could acquire the most realistic depiction of the actual user experience, I made this option.

Due to a lack of difference in the site’s Time to DOM Interactive between the Control and Variation in the test, there was no noticeable difference in conversion rate, which I ascribe to this. An A/B test on a website resulted in a 25 percent improvement in page load time (more than a one-second reduction). I’ll also talk about how this experiment led to progress.

Are you concerned about sending so many hits to GA?

Definitely, there’s a problem with the number of hits you’re sending to Google Analytics (GA). Keep in mind that this implementation transmits an event for every pageview. Most concerning is GA’s arbitrary quota of 500 page views per session. If GA sees 500 hits in a single session, it will stop processing new data for that session and close it.

Furthermore, the free edition of GA’s terms of service specifies that a property cannot receive more than 10 million hits per month if it is greater than a single page. ) (In reality, it’s far less rigid and more like a threshold. To be labeled, a website must receive around 50 million monthly hits, according to the ones I’ve looked at thus far.

As a result, unless our client has GA360 (in which case the hits per session restriction may be increased to 2000/month and the monthly hit limits are not much of an issue), I tend to move the data to separate property and then stitch it together later.

Common Ways to Improve Avg. Page Load Time

For e-commerce websites, reducing the file size of your images is a good way to speed things up. Loading times can be slowed down by images that aren’t optimized or are very huge. There may also be an overabundance of on-page services, which are JavaScript-based objects. This could result in a halt in production. It’s a good idea to go over your source code from time to time and delete any outdated JavaScript tags that may still be present.

It is possible to test the speed of a website and get precise advice for improvement using the new: tool. Using Google’s Test My Site Tool is now possible. You may learn a lot about how to speed up the loading time of your website with the help of this handy tool. It will provide guidance on how to do the following:

Compress images
Compress resources with GZIP
Minify resources
Leverage browser caching
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
Handle page redirects

Implementing the suggestions in this article will help speed up the loading time of your website as a whole. If you are serious about increasing your e-commerce sales, you should hire a developer as soon as possible to work on this issue.

Summary.

Page load time google analytics, Page Value, and Average Page Load Time are just two of the many ways in which Page Value may help you optimize your site and improve your business’s return on investment. Prioritize which pages need the most attention by using this Page Value and Average Page Load Time analysis to find out which pages are most important.

FAQs

Is Google Analytics able to track how long a website takes to load?

Reports on site speed demonstrate how quickly users are able to view and engage with the material. For example, you can identify the areas of your business that require improvement and measure the amount of those improvements. Latency is measured in three ways by the Site Speed reports. The time it takes for a representative sample of visitors to your site to load the page.

How long does it take for a page to load?

The time it takes for a page to load, as measured from the beginning of navigation to the beginning of the load event, is known as the page load time. Let performance be measured by the amount of time it takes. allow page load time to equal the unit of time.

Is there an average amount of time it takes for a page to load?

On desktops, the average Fully Loaded time is 10.3 seconds, but on mobile devices, it’s 27.3 seconds. The following are the most important takeaways: It takes 10.3 seconds to load a web page on a desktop and 27.3 seconds to load a page on a mobile device. Pages load 87.84 percent more slowly on mobile devices than they do on desktop computers.

How critical is it that a website loads quickly?

The speed at which a brand’s online audience perceives it is critical. Having a website that loads quickly is seen as a sign of trustworthiness and professionalism by humans. In contrast, a sluggish website frustrates users the most. The majority of users leave the site after a few seconds, preferring to go to a speedier site that can suit their needs.

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