Google Analytics Woes and Solutions

Periodically the Internet seems to go slow, least it does for sites that use external advertising and Google Analytics. Last Friday this seemed to be particularly bad for site using Google Analytics as pages started taking minutes to load!

Presumably this is because the external sites serving the scripts are a little heavily loaded as they are so widely used?

However, my favourite Champagne Review site seemed to remain quick and responsive. I knew they used Analytics, what was going on? How were they unaffected?

Their solution seemed to be double pronged, one was that they use a local copy of the www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js file, so rather than:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

They have:

<script src="/script/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

This will save one trip to google-analytics.com site to fetch the script file so would increase performance when the site is down or heavily loaded. An obvious gotcha with this is the local file would have to be regularly updated to stay in line with Google's.

Prehaps the more interesting bit is their second solution to the unresponsive tracking code, which involves another fetch to Google's analytics server, as obviously this cannot be done locally.

I'll follow up in my next post...
Google Analytics Solutions (Part 2)