Comments on: P3PC: Google Analytics

By: Steve Souders

Steve Souders — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:43:09 +0000

@Eric: The new GA code was added after this blog post.

By: Eric James Soltys

Eric James Soltys — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:09:35 +0000

I’ve been using GA async for months, but I don’t recognize Line 9 in your snippet. I don’t see it on the Google Code page either.

By: Steve Souders

Steve Souders — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:42:46 +0000

I'm happy to see that Blogger is now using the Google Analytics async snippet!

By: Steve Souders

Steve Souders — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:13:13 +0000

@shawn: I wasn’t able to sign up for Omniture. Can you post a URL that’s using their default snippet, and point me to documentation about their snippet? (Use the “contact Steve” link if you want to do that offline.)

@Phil: A 204 No Content is the preferred status code to use, making the size of the beacon a non-issue. ETag and P3P response headers don’t help. In fact, they might hurt in that they had more bytes to the response.

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:35:31 +0000

@Steve, very interesting post. Two related questions…

a) How much of an impact on performance would moving from a 1*1 beacon to a 2*1 (or 2*2) have?

List of sites that use 2*2 beacons
http://112.2o7.net/b/ (omniture)
http://omtr.d1.sc.omtrdc.net/b/
http://tracking.tigtags.com/pixel/1/1.gif
http://tracking.percentmobile.com/pixel/1

List of sites that use 1*1 beacons
http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif
http://statse.webtrendslive.com/1/dcs.gif
http://data.coremetrics.com/cm?cvdone=p
http://c14.statcounter.com/t.php?sc_project=1806836&security=7a639ec4
http://counter.goingup.com/badge.php?st=1&b=5
http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel
http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/activity

b) Is their any benefit in setting a p3p or Etag for the ga.js & utm.gif as these are present on Yahoo Analytics but not GA.
e.g. P3P policyref=”/w3c/p3p.xml”, CP=”xxx” and Etag “xxx”

Thanks

Phil.

By: shawn

shawn — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:59:06 +0000

It would be great to see tests on the snippets from some of the other large analytics vendors, especially Omniture. Maybe it would help them put a little more emphasis on performance. :)

By: Mike Dickey

Mike Dickey — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:13:28 +0000

@Cracks: we found a problem with the 3.0.1 Mac installer and fixed it probably shortly after you downloaded. If you re-download it should work fine, but this fix should work as well:
http://pion.org/node/173

By: Steve Souders

Steve Souders — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:23:16 +0000

@jpvincent: I think 204 image response is better than XHR because it works across domains, is less code to implement, and its behavior is in the spec.

@Pat: Hi! Everyone – if you’re not using Pat’s WebPagetest.org go check it out. One of the best tools in the past year. To answer your question: Yes, I usually end up talking to these teams, either before or after. I always say that no one starts off with the goal to build a slow web site, many times they just don’t know or don’t have time to do the analysis. Generally, I’ve found web site owners to be very receptive to my free consulting advice. And what a cool company Google is to let me do it!

@Brian: Great to hear from you. Thanks for being so willing to answer questions about the new GA snippet.

By: Cracks

Cracks — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:58:27 +0000

I’ve been using the aSync gA since day dot. Very happy to see instant performance improvements.

Even more excited to to see the new, Google-endorsed Pion.app tagless gAnalytics integration. (http://www.atomiclabs.com/pion-web-analytics/index.php)

Would love Steve, and any of you performance Gurus, to voice your thoughts on this, so that we followers can learn. I’m actually unable to get the app to run on my Mac – anyone else tried it yet?

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:21:12 +0000

@Mathias @kangax

We’re still considering document.body, but we’re currently more interested in another replacement for that line, which we’re testing right now. DM me on twitter if you’d like to discuss.