Missing Site Speed Data

There is no setting for “100%” of user timing samples.

Google Analytics automatically varies the sample rate based on the number of page views your site received the previous day. See the table here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-timings#sampling_considerations

Since it’s based on historical data for the site, it can sometimes take a bit of time for the timing data to show up in your Google Analytics report. If you are still not seeing it by now, let me know and I’ll see if I can go digging for you.

Okay, so you are not using page timings but user timings?

So you aren’t actually using siteSpeedSampleRate? What’s this setting called Sample Rate in the Advanced-tab for then?

The Sample Rate in the advanced tab is basically just a sample rate as a whole. Primarily it’s used for very large sites that don’t want to pay for Google Analytics Premium. The free Google Analytics accounts are limited to 10,000,000 hits per month. So say you get 50,000,000 hits in a month, but don’t want to pay for premium, you can do your analytics based on a smaller sample size… like maybe you just want to run analytics on 10% of your user base to stay under 10M hits/month.

Some info on that here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1070983

Yes, that is exactly what I thought it would do. But: Whatever value I enter there, siteSpeedSampleRate is not set nor included in the tracking-code (so to say). Therefore it is not measured at all.
And I’m far away from 10 million hits a month ??

There’s some confusion in this question between an account’s overall sample rate, and the specific sample rate set for tracking speed of individual pageviews, which are two totally different settings.

By default, the GA Universal tracking code only tracks the speed of 1% of pageviews, even if the overall account is set to 100% Sample Rate (which applies to all data, not page speed specifically.)

The OP (and I) would like the plugin to allow addition and customising of the siteSpeedSampleRate in the on-page tracking code, which is necessary to override the 1% default. This is accomplished by editing the default ga_create call to include the ‘siteSpeedSampleRate parameter. So the default Create call of

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-1', 'auto');

is adjusted to:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-1', 'auto', {'siteSpeedSampleRate': 100});

or whatever percentage up to 100% the account owner specifies to stay withing the 10,000 max. pageviews per day which applies to this functionality.

It’s a critical adjustment needed to make the RUM (Real User Monitoring) of pagespeed in GA become useful for small and medium traffic sites, as a 1% sample size is simply worthless for these sites. This kind of RUM measurement of page speed is going to become absolutely critical as mobile speed is poised to become a significant ranking factor for Google Search and mobile page speed can only be effectively tracked this way. Because it takes into account all the variables of actual visitors’ mobile network speed, latency, geographic distance, phone OS, browser etc.

This capability is already available in for example Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin and it would be wonderful if it could be implemented here to further enhance the additional data-gathering that this plugin already includes.

Can this be implemented?

Paul

P.S Google’s documentation of this data collection customisation can be found at:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference