 |
 |
 |
|
05.05.08 The Placement Of Your Analytics Code  By Manoj Jasra Ever wonder how your websites' data in your analytics reports would be affected based on the placement of your analytics code on the page? Eric Enge and his team at Stone Temple Consulting have begun answering this question by testing the placement of the same analytics code within the top and bottom of a web page. With the help of Dennis Mortensen and the IndexTools team, we setup a more disciplined test. In this test, we placed Javascript both at the top and the bottom of the web pages for two sites (Tool Parts Direct and City Town Info).
The scripts were basically identical, except they fed their data into 2 different IndexTools accounts. This allowed us to more accurately measure the impact of placement on counting of visitors to the site. While we implemented the two scripts site wide, we focused our analysis on the Page Views to the home page.
It is a well known fact that data quality from web analytics isn't the greatest and can be very far off from 100%. Additionally, it should be trends that analysts should focus in order to gain a sense of the entire picture for you business' strategy. Suggested Action(s)
Our suggestion would be that if your page load is normally pretty snappy (total page load time of under 3 or 4 seconds), then keep your Javascript at the bottom, and remove any risk related to analytics vendor downtime. The small loss of data you see in this scenario should not be a significant factor in the value of your analytics data. But, if your page load time is a bit slower (4 seconds or more), you may want to consider placing your analytics Javascript at the top of your web page. Your data loss will be larger, and also the nature of the lost data may start to differ. Source: www.stonetemple.com Comments About the Author: Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog. |
|
| ||||||||||||||||
-- SmallSiteNews is an iEntry, Inc. publication -- iEntry, Inc. 2549 Richmond Road, Lexington, KY 40509 2008 iEntry, Inc. All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy | Legal archives | advertising info | news headlines | free newsletters | comments/feedback | submit article |
