A fond farewell to Connection Speed

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 | 2:13 PM

Google Analytics helps you measure how visitors arrive to your site. For example, by traffic source, geography, landing pages, and other dimensions. Unfortunately, we’re no longer able to offer data on one of these dimensions: Connection Speed, and we are now in the process of deprecating the Connection Speed dimension.

You will still be able to access historical connection speed data prior to February 25th, 2011 through the current version of Google Analytics and the Google Analytics API. The Connection Speed report in the current version of Analytics will be removed next week. However, you can continue to use Connection Speed as a dimension in custom reports. For the Google Analytics API, we plan to remove this dimension in three months. Again, this is only for historical data before February 25th, 2011.

If you rely on Connection Speed to understand the effect of page load time and latency, we’re working on a solution for you that we expect to have ready in the coming weeks.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

10 comments:

Brendan said...

I thought it was a pretty useless report anyway. Most visits had a connection speed of "not set"!

3:59 PM

Mette said...

I definitely want to see the connection speed data returned to Google Analytics reporting as this data will be instrumental in our new site launch and first few weeks. I hope the new report comes online soon! thx!

6:22 PM

manhattanofficespace said...

All webmasters should be focused on page speed so connection speed is really irrelevant.

7:40 AM

jm said...

Would be nice if Google could elaborate a bit more on WHY it's going away rather than just saying, "we're no longer able to offer data".

I'm guessing, due to the minimal comments on this posting, that for most people, they don't really care, but it did come in handy.

Of course, the unknown status line was useless, but the overall report was helpful to be able to see, for example, what % of our viewers were still on dial-up. It helps to counter the argument that we still need to address those people on slow connections.

Same for the opposite. For example, if we know 90% of our viewers are on a T1 line, than it's not as big an issue if we offer them a 15Mb PDF download as opposed to spending hours trying to optimize the PDF as much as possible.

3:24 PM

Marilyn said...

The biggest problem I see this making, is the ability to see what percent of web traffic is still on dial-up. Which in the, not so great, great state of Michigan can still be 25% and much much higher depending on where you are targeting. This information is important when you are building sites for clients that have specific target audiences or when you are trying to get a client to change over to a more media rich website after years of hosting a website optimized for dial-up.

8:07 AM

scottl said...

I rely on this report also, we sell equipment to many farmers, most of which are still on a dial up connection. I hope this other option is going to help show this information.

6:38 AM

Susan said...

I am sorry to see it go. I work in education and thought the information was useful as we evaluate the media we use. I'll have to look for other analytic tools now.

10:11 AM

ReganGoWFB said...

Your new page speed that tracks how long it takes a page to load is pretty useless without being able to break it down by connection speed.

The dial up and mobile connections are greatly skewing the data.

10:29 AM

Admin said...

The connection speed is a useful metric for website planners. It can give a fair idea about the user base, using which the webmaster can provide multimedia rich content. I am not implying that connection speed alone is needed. Connection speed in addition to Page loading speed will definitely be useful. Why not to gather data that is available?

2:01 AM

Richard Matzinger said...

Almost a year ago you said " we’re working on a solution for you that we expect to have ready in the coming weeks." Yet I see no progress or announcements about replacing the connection speed report.

Rural users often have no choice but dial-up connections and those same people, due to their isolation, are VERY motivated to purchase online.

We need to know if our efforts to improve page performance are increasing the number of visitors using dial-up connections.

Please bring back the connection speed report!

2:53 PM

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