Google Analytics Connection Speed stat
I have been working a lot with Google analytics a lot lately and I like it a lot. Before I used it I had asked some friends what percentage of their site visitors were dial up. They gave me these real low numbers like 3-5%. I thought that was real low. Specially in the niche they were in. Now that I have my own stats I see the same numbers. Right now I have 5.32% dail up users and 63.5% broadband. The rest goes to unknown. When you have 27% unknown those numbers are almost worthless. I would imagine that all broadband providers are known so there is very good chance those are dial up. Also T1 users could be dail up. Anybody can start an ISP with a t1 and some modems. These numbers are pretty much worthless.
Categories: Google
I agree, the big unknown percentage makes the data pretty much useless. Unless they get more info to lower the “unknown” percentage this bit of their stats won’t be very valuable.
So you actually like Google Analytics even though for this data it’s not helping you? Are there other features you like? I haven’t liked it much either, so I was just wondering.
Correct! I like it except for the connection data where I recently got about 30% unknown again. So that is not very meaningful. I just find it confusing how different the results from AwStats, Webalizer and Analytics are when you compare them. Quite significant in terms of percentages across key metrics like uniques and impressions.
The unknowns come from Firefox browsers and users that have java scripts turned off. This number will continue to rise as more and more people are using Firefox.
Also. I personally do not believe the low percentages of people reported using dial up. I have an observation of my own. Recently I had issues with my DSL. The connection speed became extremely slow due to a network problem. It would literally take a minute or two for the web pages to load on come sites. Looking at the status bar, I think I found the culprit. On the pages/sites that took the longest to load, it was the urchinTracker.js in the status bar that seemed to be holding up the page load.
So, I bet if you are on dial up and that same script causes your surfing to stop, you do what I did and you back out and look elsewhere.
Just a thought.
I have 40% dialup users, shows how far behind India is since most my traffic is from India
Still 5% dial-up is high. In the Netherlands providers are ceasing the dial-up service.
As for the 27% unknows; I think that is broadband too. So focus for your analytics on the broadband users.
As for firefox, it has not a 27% coverage among the browsers, so that can’t explain the 27%.
I am only talking about the US market since that is all I know about. I understand that other countries have more people on broadband. US is still very behind. All major providers are known and it is hard for somebody to become their own broadband provider. It is very easy to become a dial up provider. I still believe the vast majority of the unknown is dial up.
One other point is that when you talk about dail up % there are 2 things to consider. One number is how many people have dial up and how many have broadband. The other is how often each is used. A ton of people may have dial up but they probably don’t use it for much. Some people will do most their browsing at work because their connection at home is so bad.
Is Google Analytics accurate??? can you give me some example in how you will know that your site is visited? in the other hand thus blog comments help raise your percentage in google analytics?
A bigger problem I find with the free Google product is it’s inability to account for the majority of the visitors to the sites I have and monitor. Using server stat readers, I have a very accurate measure of literally every visitor to any site I maintain. Comparing this data to what Google reports shows that GA is missing or not reporting as much as 30% of site visitors over a number of websites.
I guess you get what you pay for.
There is no accurate method of analytics. Every program has a flaw. You just have to learn how to read them. GA has issues because it uses javascript. They may also be doing some things to make the data more accurate. You need to learn about different types of traffic. When I take somebodies analytics and filter out all the junk people tend to get kind of upset that I took away traffic. Most people don’t realize that so much of that traffic is junk. There are so many bots out there right now. There are also a lot of humans that function like bots and that traffic is trash as well. If your not heavily filtering your reports you don’t have accurate numbers.
Google Analytics, it really helps a lot….
Great post. Blogs are a very natural way to attract links. I’d love to see a post on how to get your company to blog. Particularly if you are dealing with a large, conservative company.
I apprecate your comment. The paid review you submitted in ReviewMe, actually asked for a review of the home page, so I have my honest first looks. I would still be interested to learn more about your affiliate tracking software, but that still isn’t an active link on your site.
Surely this can’t be that accurate though, how would it be able to tell what kind of connection everybody is on?
If it worked by download speed then it wouldn’t be accurate and if it went by IP address then wouldn’t it require the ISPs to release information on every IP?
Very interesting post on Analytics – to follow up to my previous comment, I researched and found out that it is done by IP.
We are using Google analytics to better understand performance assoicated with ExperienceLA.com, the ExperienceLA Blog, and the entry pages for ExperienceLA WiFi. We operate a 16 block public WiFi district in Downtown Los Angeles. With 98% of the connection speed for the WiFi entry page shows as “Unknown”, whereas on ExperienceLA.com, the “Unkown is around 20%. ExperienceLA.com has a lot of local content, and we think we have higher traffic from mobile devices than most web destinations.
Anyway, “Unkn own” is a great indicator of mobile devices on ones webpages. In google analystics, you can also see exact stats for iphones and other mobile devices. I suspect that the comment above above java being turned off would apply to wireless devices and help expain this stat.
Would like to hear other comments with regard to Unknown Connection speed and mobile devices.
Google Analytics s the best stat counter.
Google analytics has a section for mobile content.
I too though have been getting a number of unknowns and the stats are not the same as my AWStats page in my CPanel. I think Google perhaps does not count repeat visitors on the same day. ( or do they ? )
I have a lot of images on my site since its devoted to Blu Ray movies and celebrities and images tend to be large so that probably explains why the unknowns are actually making my bounce rate high as they take up 33% of the total visits to my site.
I wish i had a plugin which could disable images for dial up users but i don’t see how thats possible since it would need to know the user is on dial up.
I have Quantcast analytics too and its in embedded in the page and it pretty much reads identical data as far as visits go that Google does but they don’t have the amount of stats that Google offers.