A quick post about a new feature Google released quietly: it's possible to raise your site speed sample rate from 10% to 100% if you want. Especially small sites can take advantage of this. How often have you seen this:

A very low sample of pageviews where a page load time calculation is done. This leads to a very bumpy graph in actual page load times. And that is very annoying if you want to analyze your "bring my page load time down" efforts, You can only significantly say something about it if you have at least a week of data. And we all want to see results right away

Read more: Small site? Raise your page load time calculation sample to 100% »

Last October Google added a cool feature to their Analytics suite called Goal Flows. That feature is really amazing and helped my find a lot of 'problems' in several sites. Back in the old days we had the old funnel that looked like this:

Problems

It was a very helpful funnel that provided some insights in the way people went through an ordering process. But there were also some huge problems with this funnel:

Read more: Why I love the new Goal Flows in Google Analytics »

A lot of site owners want to track outbound links so they can see how often they are clicked. It's also useful to see when and where people left your site. Google Analytics knows the exit time of your last page, where in normal cases the last visited page is not counted in the spend time on site/page.

But, there is a big but. A lot of outbound link tracking is done like this:

<a href="http://andrescholten.net" onclick="trackClick(this)">Nice site</a>

And this is what happens when you click on this outbound link:

1. The onclick is executed first
2. The trackClick function generates an IMG element with a URL that points to the Web Analytics vendor
3. The onclick function is handled and the browser starts with the href part

And then the race starts:
Read more: Tracking outbound links? I bet you only measure 70 percent »

Since the start of the new Google Analytics version (V5) we're unable to export more than 500 rows to for instance Excel. I figured there must be a solution to raise that number to 10.000 or more, so I started coding.

In the old Google Analytics there was the "&limit=10000" parameter that you could add to the export URL. In the new interface you can select the amount of rows below the table:

And after everything is loaded you can export those 500 with the usual export button.
Read more: How to export more than 500 rows in new Google Analytics interface »

With the new release of ga.js this is possible. In the old days a fired event immediately after a trackPageview would cause Google Analytics to report a 0% bouncerate for that visit. But sometimes you don't want that behavior because the event is not always triggered by the visitor.

For instance: I track page load times the same way Google Analytics does, but in an unsampled way (Google only meausures 10%). To do that I fire an event immediately after the trackPageview, but I do that in another profile with a different UA-XXXX-Y number so it won't affect my bouncerates. But now we have an extra parameter:

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

If you set this opt_noninteraction (boolean) to true it wil not affect bouncerates!!! That makes it possible to:
Read more: Google Analytics event tracking not affecting bouncerate? »