Convergent7Convergent7

(888) 388-8891
  • Home
  • Why C7
  • What We Do
  • Our Process
  • Ecommerce
  • Blog
  • Forum
  • Home
  • Blog
  • How-To
  • Track Page Speed in Volusion Ecommerce with Google Analytics
 

Blog

Monday, 23 May 2011 / Published in How-To, Seo, Volusion

Track Page Speed in Volusion Ecommerce with Google Analytics

As a Volusion consulting firm we continually get asked about their performance and quality of hosting.  If you've been around Volusion enough (or any ecommerce platform such as 3dCart, Big Commerce, etc.) the topic of site speed eventually comes up.  When Google announced that page speed is a factor in organic rankings, the queries really ramped up.  If you're a pay-per click advertiser, site speed is also a factor in your Adwords Quality Score.

With today's short-attention-span user, if you cannot provide the best and fastest experience possible then your potential customer will find a website that will.  With a potential of hundreds to thousands of pages in a typical ecommerce store, you need to find the bottlenecks that hurt and lower conversion rates.  It is with this intent that Google has released the new Site Speed Report.  This new report is only available with the new Google Analytics interface.

Why Page Speed Tracking is Important

With this new report you can answer questions such as:

  • Which pages in my online store the slowest?
  • What is the correlation between my conversion rate and page speed?
  • How does page speed impact my bounce rate?
  • Is one version of a browser slower than others?

Once you diagnose and identify the slowest pages you can begin to correct the issues.  With our internal optimization service some of the typical culprits of slow pages we find are:

  • Large, poorly optimized images;
  • Inefficient and non-standard HTML;
  • Category pages with too many displayed products per page;

The One Caveat

There is one negative aspect of tracking your site speed…the new tracking code will slightly slow down your site even more.  The reason is that Google uses a tracking GIF file which adds to the overall size of your page and download to the website visitor.  Due to this issue, the site speed code does not track the site speed of everyone who visits your site but only a sampling.  Some SEOs have reported an approximate sampling rate of 2%.  Therefore if your site does not have a good volume of traffic you may not be getting very reliable data for the report.  I expect the sampling rate may eventually rise or even be a variable you can set.

How to Install the Site Speed Tracking Code

Depending on which Google Analytic tracking code version you're using, all you have to do is add one method to your GA script:

[javascript]_trackPageLoadTime(); [/javascript]

If you're using the recommended asynchronous version, your script should look like:

[javascript]
[/javascript]

If you're using the old, traditional version, then it will look similar to:

[javascript]


[/javascript]

Once you've installed this code in your ecommerce template (which will allow every page in your store to be tracked), you should begin to see data after a few hours.

Using the Site Speed Report

The site speed report contains the following default metrics:

  • Average Page Load Time – the average time, in seconds, it took that page to load;
  • Pageviews – the number of page views within the specified date range;
  • Page Load Sample – the number of pages used to determine the average page load time.  In other words the sampling rate;
  • Bounce Rate – the bounce rate for this page;
  • % Exit – the percentage of visits that left your site from this page;

And your report may look something like:

Track Site Speed in Volusion with Google Analytics

It's another great addition to the New Google Analytics!

  • Tweet

2 Comments to “ Track Page Speed in Volusion Ecommerce with Google Analytics”

  1. katyalaroche says :Reply
    August 10, 2011 at 11:56 am

    Naturally, we are not using either of those code formats because it is an ecommerce site – so we would need to add it to “function v_ga_track(ga_account, trackDomainName, theDomainName)” right? So it would be “function v_ga_track(ga_account, trackDomainName, theDomainName,trackPageLoadTime)” would it not? 

    1. eellsworth says :Reply
      August 10, 2011 at 12:16 pm

      That code will work regardless if you’re an ecommerce site or not but your the code to fill your conversion funnel in GA will need to be updated to the async version as well.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • 8 Great Features of 3dcart’s Version 8 Release

    Late this summer, 3dcart started rolling out th...
  • How Changing One Word on a Product Page Increased Sales by 85.7%

    For those of you I have spoken with the past 8-...
  • Google Analytics Setup for Volusion Mobile Storefront

    Volusion recently announced quietly rolled out ...
  • How to Set Up Google Authorship for Your Ecommerce Store

    Why would you want to implement Google Authorsh...
  • How Volusion Mobile Ruins Your Google Analytics Data

    This post is part of a series about the recentl...

Recent Comments

  • Scott Williams on How to Install Google Analytics for Volusion Sites
  • Superior Lighting on How to Install Google Analytics for Volusion Sites
  • Scott Williams on How to Install Google Analytics for Volusion Sites
  • Superior Lighting on How to Install Google Analytics for Volusion Sites
  • Steven Spencer on How to Install Google Analytics for Volusion Sites

Archives

  • September 2017
  • March 2017
  • May 2014
  • February 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009

Categories

  • 3dCart
  • CRO
  • Ecommerce
  • Google Analytics
  • How-To
  • Lifestyle
  • Mobile
  • SEM
  • Seo
  • Small Business
  • Social Media
  • Technology Tools
  • Volusion

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org
Convergent7 |
14351 Myford Rd #220, Tustin, CA 92780 |
(888) 388-8891
Convergent7
14351 Myford Rd #220
Tustin, CA 92780

(888) 388-8891

© 2019 Convergent7 - All Rights reserved

TOP





captcha