More ways to measure your website's performance with User Timings
By Satish Kambala and Mustafa M. Tikir, Google Analytics
Team
Cross-posted from the Google
Analytics Blog
As part of our mission to make the web faster, Google Analytics provides
Site
Speed reports to analyze your site’s page load times. To help you measure and
diagnose the speed of your pages in a finer grain, we’re happy to extend the collection of
Site Speed reports in Google Analytics with User Timings.
With User Timings, you can track and visualize user defined custom timings about websites. The
report shows the execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction
that you want to track. This can include measuring how quickly specific images and/or
resources load, how long it takes for your site to respond to specific button clicks, timings
for AJAX actions before and after onLoad event, etc. User timings will not alter your pageview
count, hence, makes it the preferred method for tracking a variety of timings for
actions in your site.
To collect User Timings data, you'll need to add JavaScript timing code to the interactions
you want to track using the new
_trackTiming
API included in ga.js (version 5.2.6+) for reporting custom timings. This API allows you to
track timings of visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews (like Event
Tracking). User timings are defined using a set of Categories, Variables, and
optional Labels for better organization. You can create various categories and track several
timings for each of these categories. Please refer to the
developers
guide for more details about the _trackTiming API.
Here are some sample use cases for User Timings
- To track timings for AJAX actions before and after onLoad
event.
- A site can have their own definition of "User Perceived Load Time", which can be
recorded and tracked with user timings. As an example, news websites can record time
for showing the above fold content as their main metric instead of onLoad
time.
- Detailed performance measurement and optimization of sub components on a page, such
as time to load all images, CSS or Javascript, download PDF files and time it takes to upload
a file.
Want to check out User Timings Report in your account?
Go to the content section and click the User Timings report under Content section. There are
three tabs within the User Timings report for you to review: Explorer, Performance, and Map
Overlay. Each provides a slightly different view of user timings reported.
The
Explorer tab on the User Timings report shows the following metrics by
Timing Category, Timing Variable, or Timing Label (all of which you define in your
timing
code).
- Avg. User Timing—the average amount of time (in seconds) it takes for the timed code
to execute
- User Timing Sample—the number of samples taken
The Explorer tab also provides controls that you can use to change the tabular data. For
example, you can choose a secondary dimension—such as browser— to get an idea of how speed
changes by browser.
To learn more about which timings are most common for user timings, switch to the Performance
tab. This tab shows timing buckets, providing you with more insight into how speed can vary
for user reported timings for selected category, variable and label combinations. You may
switch to
Performance tab at any point of navigation in the Explorer tab,
such as after drilling down on a specific category and variable, to visualize distribution of
user reported timings. The bucket boundaries for histograms in Performance Tab are
chosen to be flexible so that users can analyze data at low values ranging from 10
milliseconds granularity to 1 minute granularity with addition of sub-bucketing for further
analysis.
The
Map Overlay tab provides a view of your site speed experienced by users
in different geographical regions (cities, countries, continents).
Satish Kambala and Mustafa M. Tikir are on the Google Analytics Team.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
