How to measure page load time with google analytics

I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics’ Custom Variables feature and put together a neat integration that lets us measure the real performance of visitors to our website. It’s a little clumsy since Google Analytics wasn’t really meant to do this, but it’s good enough that many of you might find it useful.

Before we get started, here’s how it works:

1. When a visitor lands on our landing page, we capture some timing information to measure the page load time.
2. We’ll record that page load time in a Session scope Custom Variable.
3. The page load time is reported to Google Analytics with the trackPageview call.
4. The data is aggregated in Google Analytics and can be viewed in the Visitors > Custom Variables section.
5. We need to export the data into excel to do anything useful with it because Google Analytics isn’t too good at dealing with numerical data in custom variables.

Now, here’s the step by step:


more @ http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/how-to-measure-page-load-time-with-google-analytics/