iEntry 10th Anniversary
SEOThe Placement Of Your Analytics Code
By Manoj Jasra
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-05-05
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).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.
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.
Suggested Action(s)Source: www.stonetemple.com
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.
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About the Author:
Manoj Jasra is a well respected search marketing veteran having been in the industry since 2002. Manoj currently serves as a Sr. Analyst on the web solutions team at Shaw Communications Inc. Manoj's role primarily consists of providing SEO/PPC and Web Analytics strategies in addition to business insight on Shaw's web properties. Previously, Manoj held the role of Director of Technology at Enquiro Search Solutions where he oversaw Enquiro's product development for search marketing solutions and acted as the lead on both SEO Training and Enquiro's Web Analytics approach. Check out Manoj's well read blog, Web Analytics World, which focuses on his insight in Search Marketing, Mobile, Technology and of course, Web Analytics. You can contact Manoj at manoj.jasra@gmail.com