Ben Shoemate's Notebook

We’ve heard the need to get into more detail about the reporting of your page load times. We’ve introduced a new performance tab in the SIte Speed report that will allow you to see a breakdown of the samples. This allows you to move beyond the averages and better understand your site’s performance.

For example, I’m looking at the Site Speed report for the Google Analytics blog. I can see that my average page load time is 7 seconds (we have some room to improve here). Now, we know that averages can hide what’s happening underneath the surface.

With the Performance tab in the Site Speed report, I can now dig in and find those details.

Ah ha! I can now see that, almost half of my visitors (46%) are actually seeing decent load times of under 3 seconds. And another 32% are getting the page in under 7 seconds. But there’s definitely still room to improve with a full 20% seeing 7+ second load times.

Taking this a step further, I can apply an advanced segment, in this case Visits with Conversions. I have set up the blog with engagement goals. So I’m trying to see if there’s a relationship between page load time and engaging with the content here.

And looking at this data, it looks like there is. The distribution of visits with conversions is skewed towards fast-loading pages. As page load time increases, I am seeing a drop in conversions. I can actually see the business impact of a slow loading page.

Another type of segmentation to try would be by geography. To start off, try segmenting visits from your country versus visits not from your country. From there you may want to dig into specific countries and look at page load times.

You'll find the Site Speed report in the Content section of the new Google Analytics. To get site speed data, you need to make a small change to your Google Analytics tracking code. Setup instructions and more details about the Site Speed report are in the Help Center. We hope you enjoy the new Performance tab, and you can expect more updates for Site Speed coming soon.

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster, and we are glad to see that many website owners share the same idea. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.

Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site.

One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers. In addition to the Site Speed report, we’ve created a custom report that you can use to help answer these questions: view the Site Speed custom report.

By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center. Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.

We’re excited to bring this important metric into Google Analytics as part of the new Google Analytics platform. Please continue to send us feedback on Site Speed and the rest of the new Google Analytics.

By Zhiheng Wang, Phil Mui on behalf of the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team.