I stumbled upon a certain Firefox plug-in, so to concentrate your attention to it. It is a very interesting plug-in for those who are into statistics, to monitor sites that are bringing visitors…
Greasemonkey can be useful to you if you use Google Analytics and if you can from all the collected data (where and when did the visitor come from) extract the referral sites and check which site is more than usual leading visitors to your own site (and vice versa). The plug-in itself is very simple to use, so the instructions given in the mentioned link are very sufficient to enable it. In the same link you have a short plug-in simulation, so you can know what to expect…
As it always happeness, along with one comes the other interesting research article — in this case the research of the influence of analytics javascript positioning within the page.
Research done by the crew from IndexTools and Stone Temple state that placing the code on the page top (at the beggining of BODY tag or header), against the placing of the code at the end of the page (by the end of BODY tag) can influence the statistics.
The first research was carried out using tracking pixel on the top of the file and IndexTools Javascript at the end of the file. With this research, the conclusion was made that tracking pixel can ‘see’ 2-4% more traffic than Javascript, while the time delay between these two types was 1.4 seconds. Clearly, a few percents can seem as negligible number, but if we are talking about a very large number of visitors…do the math!
Now, not to leave things like this, another test was carried out using solely Javascript on differnet positions- at the beginning and at the end of the file, and on different sites in order to get trusty results. And the results are:
- The difference exists and the amount of ‘lost’ traffic moved from 2-4%. Also, that percentage increases in the cases of slower page uploads.
What does that mean? It means that if the upload time of your page is over 4 seconds, you should think about positioning the script at the top of the file. The reason you should consider that option is:
- If your page in not fully loaded, user might see the wanted link and click on it before your page is fully loaded (therefore, the visit is not recorded).
- Another group of visitors may give up opening the page due to the time it takes to open.
- You may loose the recorded load/conversion if the visitor came via PPC campaign.
Of course, this won’t solve problems many analytics servers face (statistics unconsistency, statistics difference, etc.), but undoubtedly, it is one step in fixing some of the problems…