• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

With loading times rumoured to be one of the determining factors in search results in 2010 it is highly recommended to update your analytics tracking code

The new tag is immediately available to all Analytics users and further explained at Google Code. The structure of the new code can be found here. There is no doubt that most Google Analytics plugins for blogging platforms will be updated over the next days.

You can access this new feature on your Google Webmaster Tools account, under Labs > Site Performance. In this section, you are shown a performance overview of your whole site. It displays the average page load time, which refers to the amount of time it takes the entire page to fully display on your browser, as well as a comparison of it against other sites.

Site Performance tool in action showing the speed of one of the sites I handle.

Aside from the performance statistics, there is also a section called Page Speed Suggestions where it gives you suggestions on how to optimize the pages on your site. This feature is powered by Google’s Page Speed tool, a powerful program that runs a number of diagnostic tests against a web page, and analyzes the page’s performance according to a number of general page performance “rules” that are known to speed up page load times.

Since the Page Speed Suggestions evaluates only a few example pages from your site, you have the option to download and install the Page Speed FireFox Add-on which let’s you evaluate any web page and immediately get the result. (Important note: You need to have the FireBug FireFox add-on installed first before installing Page Speed).

Page Speed FireBug add-on showing the performance summary of BloggingPro’s homepage

As you can see on the screenshot above, Page Speed lists down suggestions like caching, gzip compression, optimizing CSS, and many more. Thanks to this, we can now be able to know where we should focus our attention on when we want to make our blogs load faster.

To learn more about the Site Performance Tool, go here. To learn more about Google Page Speed, go here.

Related Articles from the SplashPress Blog Network

• Surfing the slow web – Blog Herald
• Upping your blog’s loading time – Blog-Tutorials
• CSS Optimization: Make Your Sites Load Faster – BloggingPro

Well, that type of reply is not unfounded. I’ve talked to a lot of marketing folks and they say that they would be more comfortable if there was a data source on the metrics of social media sites like blogs. This is perhaps borne from the orientation of the senior marketing executives’ reliance on Nielsen for media data on traditional media.

Why are these metrics important? These numbers are needed to justify the effectiveness of the campaign and determine the Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing activities. Of course, when it comes to ROI, the higher the better.

So, how do we answer the age old question of where to obtain readily available metrics for blogs?

These days, it’s not that hard because most blogs install analytics tools like Google Analytics to collect data on basic stats about the blog. If these analytics tools are not installed, it’s easy to install them. Things get iffy when it comes to industry-wide data because there’s still no universally accepted source of data. (Well, maybe Google will make something like this in the future.)

Just remember, metrics are important to measure performance with quantitative goals. But If you ask me, you can be a successful blogger without wrapping yourself around the numbers.

His concern, though, was his own posts and how they would effect stats. He wanted to make sure that he was basing his incentives on the traffic received to the entire site, except people going to articles written by him, the administrator.

He asked how he could track such a thing easily while still getting lots of detail like he was used to in Performancing Metrics. There is a really easy way to do this. First, add a second site on Performancing Metrics that will be used to track everything but your own posts.

Then in the footer, next to your other Performancing Metrics javascript call, add the following code:

< ?php if(!is_author('admin') { ?> place Pmetrics JavaScript Here < ?php } ?>


This way it will check to see which author it is, and if it is anyone other than the administrator, it will show the Pmetrics JavaScript and track actions on that page. This is great because it should not only discount traffic to single posts made by the admin, but also any traffic going to pages created by the admin.

Thus, the traffic you see under the new account in Pmetrics should be everything, except the traffic to your own posts if you are the Admin. So next time you write a post that gets on Digg, it won’t count towards your writers statistics, messing up your bonus incentive system.

Here is a snippet from the article:

It was a good conference and we had several interesting conversations, but I walked away with a strange feeling. Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn’t that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we’ll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.

Definitely worth a read though I hope we are not in a digestion phase. I still like the crazy unbridled growth we’ve seen over the past two or three years.

Firstly, the above stats show that people are migrating from desktop to browser-based RSS Readers. The percentage change in one is virtually a mirror of the other, while none of the other categories has changed much (if any). Web-based Readers are up 7% and desktop Readers are down 6%. In the space of 6 months. I attribute this mostly to the strong growth of Google Reader, which in most peoples’ Feedburner stats is in the top 3 Readers. Google Reader has been the most innovative major RSS Reader over the past year, and a lot of people I know use it as their main Reader now (as do I). Bloglines and Rojo also continue to be popular.

Check out their results, and let me know if you agree or disagree with their conclusions.

Ahmed believes that this will provide Google with even more information about the elusive blogosphere and has published a post entitled Google & FeedBurner: Double Whammy.

So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).

I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties – Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now – not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.

Griffith, over on Forever Geek, has published a post called Google acquires FeedBurner for $100 million.

He goes over more of the meat and potatoes of the deal, and give a quick nod to the possible inclusion of Adsense in RSS feeds.

Although FeedBurner already gave you the option of adding advertisement to your feeds, my guess is that now it will be Adsense exclusive, if it isn’t already (I haven’t checked in a long time). Other than that, you can probably rest assured that it will remain free for everyone. The only difference is that it will probably be integrated into more Google products.

I agree with both of them. This gives Google even more information on a wide variety of sites, and while Google is not really known for improving the features of a service they buy, they have started to make some serious headway with their Blogger platform, and I can see FeedBurner becoming an integral part of their Blogger blogs. As well as providing them with a large user base that they can get using Adsense both on their sites, and in their feeds. With FeedBurner, Adsense, and Analytics, they will be able to provide you with advertising and statistics to cover every angle.

I think this was a great move for both Google and for FeedBurner, and I look forward to seeing what interesting ways that FeedBurner is integrated into Google’s already powerful brand.

Ahmed believes that this will provide Google with even more information about the elusive blogosphere and has published a post entitled Google & FeedBurner: Double Whammy.

So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).

I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties – Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now – not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.

Griffith, over on Forever Geek, has published a post called Google acquires FeedBurner for $100 million.

He goes over more of the meat and potatoes of the deal, and give a quick nod to the possible inclusion of Adsense in RSS feeds.

Although FeedBurner already gave you the option of adding advertisement to your feeds, my guess is that now it will be Adsense exclusive, if it isn’t already (I haven’t checked in a long time). Other than that, you can probably rest assured that it will remain free for everyone. The only difference is that it will probably be integrated into more Google products.

I agree with both of them. This gives Google even more information on a wide variety of sites, and while Google is not really known for improving the features of a service they buy, they have started to make some serious headway with their Blogger platform, and I can see FeedBurner becoming an integral part of their Blogger blogs. As well as providing them with a large user base that they can get using Adsense both on their sites, and in their feeds. With FeedBurner, Adsense, and Analytics, they will be able to provide you with advertising and statistics to cover every angle.

I think this was a great move for both Google and for FeedBurner, and I look forward to seeing what interesting ways that FeedBurner is integrated into Google’s already powerful brand.

I am super excited to try this out. I haven’t just yet, as I am on my laptop in a hotel, but as soon as I am back on a real computer, I will be all over it.

Here are some details:

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

This was recently announced on WordPress.com, but I think it deserves a post on WordPress.org’s blog.

Here’s his answer: “The number of new posts per day that Technorati is tracking is indeed increasing, from about 1.3 million posts per day to about 1.5 million postings per day.”

However, there has been slight decrease in the number of English-language posts.

The number of daily English language posts dropped to 495,000 in March from 507,000 in October.

In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.

In his email Sifry says “My conclusion is that we’re still seeing growth in the blogosphere, but that the growth is slowing.”

Check out the full post, and let me know what you think this means for the blogosphere in general.