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I use my own server side analytics code. The reason I do, is that, no matter how much people pump Google Analytics, I'm afraid of it. I've been to too many si

I use my own server side analytics code. The reason I do, is that, no matter how much people pump Google Analytics, I'm afraid of it. I've been to too many sites that were completely hung, and in the status bar, my browser is saying "waiting for www.google-analytics.com". I usually hit refresh and it generally works, but how many people don't? This isn't something that's happened to me once or twice. It happens often enough that I'm consciously avoiding ga. I don't need to cause more people to bounce for no reason.

124816 17y ago
Several browsers, including many versions of Firefox, had a bug relating to the status bar. The "waiting for ..." would only update after the first byte had been received from the next file. Thus, a slow resource would leave the status bar blaming www.google-analytics.com. The bug has since been fixed in Firefox -- I don't have the url handy though. IMO this is the main benefit of the async snippet -- random server problems won't lead inaccurate metrics. (This is most visible with adwords campaigns -- you can see the number of clicks you paid for, but the number of visits they lead to is less. Typically due to a combination of high bounce rate plus slow loading pages.)
- enomar 17y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487638 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487638
enomar 17y ago
Much of what you're referring to is historical. Google fixed their serving infrastructure in early 2009 to be faster and much more reliable. Also as someone else posted, FF was incorrectly blaming the last thing on page for being slow, which was ga.js. That's been fixed in 3.6. Additionally, they've released asynchronous tracking, which you should definitely try.