Higher Education Marketing

Google Analytics Site Speed Reports

Date posted: December 15, 2011

As we've discussed in the past, optimizing your website to improve search engine rank and online presence is very important. It's equally important, however, to ensure that the user experience on your site is good. Put simply, if your program pages are not user-friendly, or if they take forever to load, it not only will foster a negative impression of your school, it may also impact your rank on Google's search engine results page. Google's Matt Cutts discussed the role and measurement of site speed in this video: Cutts downplays the importance of site speed a tad, but only in relation to a host of other site fundamentals. In the end, anything that makes your site more user-friendly will be reflected in your search engine rank. To that end, Google Analytics have been beefing up their site speed measurement in the last year. Their Site Speed report was launched in May, but it required you to add an additional Google Analytics tracking code to see data in this report. Based on increasing user requests, Google eventually made this feature available to all Google Analytics users and removed the code requirement. In late November, they also made it easier to access these reports, adding new metrics. Google Analytics Site Speed Report         Site Speed reports can be found in the content section, with three tabs for you to review: Explorer, Performance and Map Overlay. Each provides a slightly different view of your site speed performance:
  • The Explorer tab provides an overview of load time by page.
  • The Performance tab buckets your site speed performance by page load time.
  • The Map Overlay tab provides a view of your site speed experienced by users in different geographical regions (cities, countries, continents).
Click here for more information on Google Analytics Site Speed Reports.
Are you concerned about site speed? What sort of techniques have you used to make your site more user-friendly?
  

CATEGORIES: Analytics, Blog

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  • http://affiliates.info Ofer Shoshani

    When you are collecting data for your analytics it is of the utmost importance that you learn how to tag them. Now, we know that to the novice or beginner this may sound like rocket science but actually it is not. In fact once you learn how to do it you may be pleasantly surprised at how easy it was.

    The first thing you need to do is sign up for a Google Analytics account. The next thing you need is to make sure that –if possible- there are only one or two people involved in the tagging process. The reason for that is quite simple, the more people taking part in the tagging the more chance there is for something to go wrong. Use of capital letters or even the slightest variation in spelling can cause Google to report multiple notations and that is not a good thing.

    There are simple ways to avoid this from happening, but make no mistake about it; it is something you need to learn if you want to rank well in Google.

    http://affiliates.info/Analytics-Tag

    • Sal – Higher Education Marketing

      Absolutely Ofer. In fact, we’ve discussed posting a separate piece about tagging, if only to highlight it’s importance in the process. We’ll be posting about it soon. Thanks for stopping by.