When it comes to third-party site statistics, Google Analytics (GA) is pretty much the gold standard. It provides a tremendous amount of practical information, integration with other Google products, including Adsense and Adwords, and clear charts all for free.

However, Google recently announced that it was taking things one step further and adding something almost no other analytics system has – a site speed feature.

The idea is fairly simple: as users load your site and the Analytics code, Google can track how long your page takes to load for them. Just like with any other statistic that GA collects, you can break down this information by page accessed, browser type and other variables to help you get a better understanding of how fast your site is moving and what variables might be causing it to slow down.

This feature is not automatically enabled on all GA accounts and will take a few steps to set up. However, once you do, you should be able to get a much more robust understanding of how your site and your host are performing with actual visitors.

Why Google’s Solution Is Better Than The Rest

Although there are lots of other ways to test your site’s loading time, including Pingdom Tools and Stella, they are limited in what they can do and the types of information they can provide.

To use an analogy: imagine every visitor is a customer going through a checkout line at a grocery store. They each have different items (requests) and their carts are of varying sizes. In many cases, they are also all serviced by different cashiers using different equipment. The result is that every customer has a slightly different experience.

The problem with most site testing services is that they are similar to secret shoppers who go into the store, buy something and time how long it takes to get out. In the case of one-off tools like Pingdom’s, the shopper only goes in once or twice. Even with monitoring services like Stella, it’s as if the same secret shopper is visiting the store again and again, buying the same things. Useful, but not necessarily relevant to actual visitors.

In comparison, Google looks at a percentage of your actual visitors, giving you data that is applicable directly to how users actually surf your site.

This gives you much more accurate and relevant information when trying to determine how your site performs in the real world, not just in the conditions presented by other services.

Installing Site Speed for Google Analytics

Setting up Site Speed on your site is fairly simple, but do bear in mind that you’ll have to make a small change to your HTML code in order to get it working.

1. Use the New Version of Google Analytics: Make sure that you are using the “New Version” of GA. You can do this by clicking the link at the top of your GA account and switching to the beta.
2. Edit Your HTML: Go into your site’s HTML and, in your GA code, add the following line underneath the other “gag” references, ” _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);”
3. Check for Data: After that, give GA a few hours to start receiving reports and then go into your GA account, look under “Content” and click the “Site Speed” link. You will likely have to set your date range to include today to see if you have any information.

If you don’t take these steps, the Site Speed feature is not turned on and will display only zeros by default. If you don’t wish to use Site Speed, no changes to your code or your account are necessary (though the new version is still worth a look).

Bottom Line

GA’s new Site Speed tool is just another feature that’s helping set GA apart from the pack. Though there’s definitely a lot of legitimate gripes about GA, especially in the area of real-time analytics, one is hard pressed to find a site on the Web that doesn’t use GA.

Simply put, the analytics that GA provides are simply too valuable to ignore, and Google has shown a clear devotion to making the product better and better.

The addition of the Site Speed tool may well indicate Google’s larger priorities as a company, namely in making the Web a faster place. Though page speed already plays a role in determining your search engine ranking, it’s very likely that this could be the first step in giving even greater weight to it as a factor.

As such, it’s more important than ever to monitor your site’s performance and Google has provided a great tool for doing just that.

Related posts:

1. How to Verify Your Site with Google Analytics It might seem to be a small thing, but virtually...
2. Yahoo! Launches Web Analytics Looks like Yahoo! is launching a “web analytics” service on...
3. 5 Quick Ways to Speed Up Your Site (Without Changing Hosts) If your site is feeling a bit sluggish, it might...
4. Google Webmaster Tools: Game-Changing Updates In a recent blog post, Google announced that it has...
5. 5 Essential Google Chrome Extensions It has been a busy year and a half for...