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by lukestevens 5717 days ago
This is a nice idea, so points for ingenuity.

There are a few small problems though:

- Page 'load' time is a bit ambiguous, I'd prefer page 'rendering' time, perhaps. (The author does note the limitation of this approach.)

- Time to window.onload may be a _very_ long time in some environments, especially when 3rd party scripts are present, especially (if memory serves) in IE.

- From eyeballing the "Bounce rate by page load time" the linear trend placed on top seems dubious -- if anything bounce rate seems to drop until the 3700ms mark. (The author notes in the text however that users seem tolerant up to the 5000ms mark).

Quibbles aside, having more page rendering time data correlated to bounce rate is an excellent idea, as I've seen some posts in web design land get pretty carried away with n-th degree optimization because they read speed matters for Google and Amazon.

In my experience, I optimized a site's page rendering time dramatically, expecting a bump in average pages per visit, and saw absolutely no change whatsoever. We need more data :)
2 comments
theDoug 5717 days ago
A lot of things are being pushed into GA that aren't entirely appropriate for it, but I'm glad people are still curious in trying these things out.
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lukestevens 5717 days ago
Yes, I agree. GA is being used more and more as an ad-hoc analytics data store these days, and hopefully with some creative uses of the GA API we'll see more interesting uses that negate the need to use Excel.
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jrosoff 5717 days ago
Thanks for the feedback!

You're correct about the issues with "page load" time. The approach in the post is really measuring the amount of time that the browser spends processing the page. However, for many modern web apps, most of the time is spent in these internal aspects of your page such as loading CSS, running javascripts, fetching images, etc...

The web timing API (there's another post about that here: http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/using-web-timing-api-to-measu...) we can get more detailed timers that count not just the browser time, but actually the full amount of time between typing in the URL into the browser (or clicking a link) and finishing the load of the page.

The linear trend line was created by excel automatically so I can't vouch for its accuracy other than my implicit trust of that feature.

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