Measure Site Speed with Google Analytics

Last week Google announced a new feature to Google Analytics that allows webmasters to measure the page load time. This move directly ties in with Google’s announcement last year about site speed affecting search rankings. A low site speed can also negatively affect an AdWords quality score.

The new addition to Google Analytics shows pages that are loading slowly. In turn, that information can be connected to campaigns, geography, browsers, and all sorts of other details. Not only can you get load time, you can see if that load time is connected to other trends, for example:

• Geography: Do certain geographic visitors have a connection with a page’s load time?
• Campaign: Which campaigns and traffic sources are associated with slower pages?
• Content: Which pages are quicker than others? Do those pages have scripts or forms that affect the speed?

Those are just a few examples. The site speed reporting is not automatic. This data is gathered through a small change in the Google Analytics code on websites: _trackPageLoadTime();

Full details on configuring Site Speed can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1205784&topic=1120718