A very hot topic last year: site speed, web performance, site performance or whatever you want to call it (got better suggestions?). But how do you measure the speed of you own site? There are several tool that can measure the load times of your site, but which one is right?

First of all: what is Site Speed

The speed of a site is the time it takes from the moment a user navigates to your site (for example through a link) until the site is fully loaded and usable. But there are many factors in this period that helps keeping the visitor patient enough to wait for a full load. The first moment is the moment when the browser begins rendering a site: until that moment people have to look at a white screen where nothing happens. Then the site starts to appear on the screen bit by bit until he is usable. And the last stage is where all the images are loaded to make the site look complete.

Read more: How to measure Site Speed or Web Performance »

What do you do if you want to know how many people visited a specific part (single page or subfolder) of your website? Very often people want to know this so they can report about it. A company can have multiple business units that all have their own subfolder on the company website, and they all want to know what their pages did. Or a campaign manager wants to know how many visits his action page attracted.

The first guess for most people would be to create this report with the Google Analytics Custom Report function:

Read more: Google Analytics visits per page »

We all know the horrible sign in Google Analytics that looks like this:

You want to analyze a bunch of data but because of that sign you know it will be sampled (incomplete) data. So, what is "sampling" exactly and how can you prevent it.

What is sampling

After Google Analytics gathered the raw unaggregated data that is being tracked by the tracking script it processes it to understandable and useful visit data. And with that visit data all available standard reports are pre-calculated and stored. That means for example that if you try to get the "Top Content" report, Google Analytics can show it to you in seconds because most of the calculations are already done.

Read more: How to prevent Google Analytics sampling data »

Often I get questions about how you can tell if a Google Analytics implementation is successful. People don't want to wait at least 4 to in some cases 24 hours before they see some data... or not. That's why I will tell you how I check this seconds after the codes are placed.

How does the tracking work

Google Analytics uses pixel tracking technology to send data to the Google servers. That means that the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Script) will put a little image on the page that is being tracked. The URL of this image looks like this:

Read more: How to check real-time if a Google Analytics implementation works »

Last week I ran into an interesting situation. I wanted to create a profile for a specific subfolder in Google Analytics. And I only wanted the events that where launched from pages within that subfolder to be reported there. This graphic shows you the situation:

A visitor lands on the homepage, he than goes to the French subfolder (what is a virtual folder because the entire site is working with AJAX). And than he decides to read some Dutch texts to have a good laugh about the weird language. On both pages he prints out the text he found there, what is being measured with Google Analytics' event tracking system.

Nothing strange now right?

Read more: Google Analytics Event Tracking and Profile Filters »