Comments on: Speeding Up Urchin with Dojo, Part 2

By: marcolepsy

marcolepsy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:40:09 +0000

@gonchuki:
Multiple pages of my site have large images, along with links visitors might click on before the page fully loads. Bounces aside, if someone shows up at page C from page A by way of page B, I’d like to know it. I’d wouldn’t want to worry about whether slow connections are skewing my stats.

By: gonchuki

gonchuki — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:54:29 +0000

@okonomiyaki3000:
can it count as bounce rate if the user didn’t even see what you had to offer? I only care about people that seen my content and then gone away.
It’s like a real life store, you don’t count passers-by as bounce rate, only the ones that did enter the store and left with their empty hands.
.
btw, you can get an approximate measure of “passers-by” by analyzing your apache logs (or whatever server you use) and counting against your analytics. It’s not ideal, as it is also not ideal to stand in the front of your store to do the same thing with people passing by.

By: slightlyoff

slightlyoff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:28:24 +0000

Darkimmortal:

Not sure about you, but I’d be hoping that would show up in my logs as anomaly and therefore that my visitor logs could serve as some sort of signal that there’s a bigger problem.

Regards

By: slightlyoff

slightlyoff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:26:52 +0000

Jordan1:

As the post says, I was already pulling in dojo.js for something else. This is about additive lag. If you’re not using dojo.js, I don’t recommend you start just to get this snippet working. If, OTOH, you want to do some DOM stuff besides, it’s a good solution.

There are both other horses *and* other courses ;-)

Regards

By: Darkimmortal

Darkimmortal — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:06:17 +0000

@gonchuki
What if, for whatever reason, the site remained not fully loaded for the entire duration of a user’s visit?

By: okonomiyaki3000

okonomiyaki3000 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:05:41 +0000

@gonchuki:
I hope this is just a case where your irony has gone over my head but do you really not see the value in knowing your bounce rate? If your users are leaving your site before it finishes loading, you might want to know that so you can do something about it…

By: gonchuki

gonchuki — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:36:41 +0000

@marcolepsy:
why would you care about that user that left your site? analytics is not about getting an artificially inflated number of visitors, it is about tracking how many people really navigated your site, while collecting useful data about them.
A user that left your site before it finished loading, is a user that’s not generating any benefit to you. It’s like he never existed at all.

By: marcolepsy

marcolepsy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:18:22 +0000

By waiting for window.load, don’t you risk missing a page view in GA for visitors who leave the page before everything loads?

For instance, if you have a page with 200kb of images that viewers tend to click off of quickly, isn’t it entirely possible for stats to be skewed compared against pages with less resources to load?

By: jaimz

jaimz — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:58:55 +0000

To me this seems to be pointless considering google is dumping Urchin in just a few months

By: gonchuki

gonchuki — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:48:23 +0000

@Jordan1:
at the bottom of the page it will still block the onLoad event, which is bad.
I don’t like this solution either. In my mootools world, I just need to mix the Asset class inline in the main js file that weighs in 1.37kb YUI compressed (around 900 bytes in GZIP), and then just do a deferred load of gs.js in the window load event.
jQuery can also do this using getScript, I certainly don’t know why people create plugins for something so trivial it needs 3 lines of code.

By: Jordan1

Jordan1 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:12:33 +0000

The irony. Won’t this just move the DNS lookup wait to “ajax.googleapis.com”, and isn’t the script to load “dojo.xd.js” also synchronous, and isn’t “dojo.xd.js” larger than “ga.js” (30k vs. 22k)? At least put a “defer” in the dojo script call to make it asynchronous in IE.

You might as well just put “ga.js” at the very bottom of the page so it gets loaded last without blocking earlier content.

By: Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:48 +0000

Whoopsie-daisies. Fixed. Thx

By: lunatic77

lunatic77 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:29:10 +0000

looks like you’re escaping your HTML entities twice…