Measuring Page Load Time with Google Analytics

Here at Pipon, we have long been emphasizing the crucial importance of improving the speed performance of a website for search engine optimization purposes.  Ever since Google announced in April 2010 that site speed was to be used as a ranking signal, improving it has become one of the most important tasks for Internet marketing strategists.

The main reason behind this is clear. Internet users and search engines alike place great prominence on speed and various research on this has indicated that speed is a major factor in achieving high conversion rates on your site since users are more likely to want to spend more time there. 

Improving and analyzing the performance of your pages for SEO has been, however, a challenging task.  Measuring and diagnosing the speed of a page has always been difficult and even with such measurements one has to also look at page speed in the context of other web analytics data. 

With this in mind, Google has recently announced a ‘Site Speed’ report in the new ‘Google Analytics platform’ that allows you to measure page load time easily across your site.  The ‘Site Speed Report’ will allow users to track which landing pages are the slowest, see which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall, analyze how page load time varies across regions and countries and also discover whether a site loads faster or slower for different browsers. 

For example, through the ‘Site Speed Report’ you may learn that the target audience of your site is located in a particular geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Such information is clearly crucial not only for SEO but also to ensure a high ROI for your site.  Through addressing this problem you can guarantee that your landing page quality does not affect your ranking in a search engine and also make sure that your targeted audience have a fast surfing experience on your site. 

It is clear therefore that the development of the ‘Site Speed Report’ is great news.  You will now be able to quickly and easily monitor a site’s performance and how it impacts the metrics of your website. 

For more information about site speed and search engine optimization please visit our website at www.piponsolutions.com