Last Thursday's Google outage had a dramatic impact on more than just Google users. It was widely reported that the outage killed 5% of Internet traffic and prevented users from accessing popular services such as Gmail and YouTube. The less-reported aspect of the story is that the outage also impacted some websites using Google Analytics. During the outage, the visitors to those sites noticed distinctly slower-than-normal loading times.
The slow-loading websites problem was caused by the way that the Google Analytics tracking code was added to the site pages. The Google Analytics page tags are hosted on Google's servers, so if the tracking code was placed at the top of the HTML page, visitors experienced delays while the content below that code loaded.
There are risks and benefits with placing web analytics page tags near the top of the HTML code or near the bottom. Last week's outage highlighted the risk of placing the tag at the top. Because of this potential issue, Stratigent has generally recommended that the Google tracking code be placed at the bottom of the page, immediately before the tag. This ensures that visitors see your site content before the Google page tag is requested.
Although there are some exceptions, this best practice also applies to other page tag-based tools. There are rare cases when the data-collection servers for any web analytics tool are either down or slow. Putting the page tag code near the bottom of the page will prevent this from adversely affecting the visitor experience.
Nestor Archival Jr.
Senior Analyst, Consulting Services
Stratigent, LLC
Thursday, May 21, 2009
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1 comments:
I know the outtage is old news, but I just stumbled across this post and thought it was worth providing the counter-view. I actually was told by a consultant years ago when the company I was at was implementing Webtrends that we should place the tag near the top of the page because, that way, we would be less likely to miss traffic that left the page before the page had even fully loaded. That's a true observation, BUT...we still put the tag at the bottom. Measurement should NEVER substantially put the user experience at risk.
In other words, I agree with you completely, but it's worth noting that there is a downside to putting the tag at the bottom of the page -- you may miss a little bit of traffic (which was traffic that is aggressively bouncing from the page).
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