New Faster Google Analytics Code

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New Faster Google Analytics Code

hugh

9:40 pm on May 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

Released a few days ago...

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 | 12:21 PM

We’re happy to announce that the asynchronous tracking tag, which came out of beta last week, is now available in your admin interface when you set up a new profile. This makes it easy for everyone to start off tracking new sites with this very fast, state-of-the-art tag.

Whether you’re tracking a single domain, or a more complex site with multiple subdomains or top level domains, there’s an option in the interface to give you exactly the code you need.

Simply select the scenario that fits your needs. The admin interface now provides the asynchronous tracking code by default, but if you need the traditional tracking snippet you can find it here.

[analytics.blogspot.com ]

Mark_A

10:54 am on May 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

Sounds great. Not sure what it means though.

And is it available for current Analytics users?

arieng

5:52 pm on May 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

This really is a big deal. The previous tracking script had an inherent problem, it would drag down the load time of the page. If you placed it at the top of your code, the rest of your page wouldn't load until the script finished phoning home. If you placed it on the bottom, you risked losing data if a user navigated away from the page before it had finished rendering.

How often was this happening? I suspect that it was pretty widespread. How often have you visited a page that seems to be fully rendered, but the browser shows that the page is still loading (sometimes for what seems like several minutes)? This is often a GA script that is having trouble making the connection back to Google's servers.

The asynchronous tag does away with that problem. I seperates the server connection from the rest of the page load, so it will not delay the loading of the page. You can safely put the tag at the top of code without worrying about affecting load time or not being able to track the session.

penders

11:41 pm on May 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

And is it available for current Analytics users?

AFAIK, yes - you can replace your old code with the new... but it no longer goes at the end of your document.

But where do you place this new asynchronous code?

(1) The help/documentation states, in bold, "just before the closing </head> tag" and goes on to state, "...we recommend placing the snippet at the bottom of the <head> section for best performance."

(2) However, within Goole Analytics itelf it states, "..immediately after the opening <body> tag."

Any preference?