Filtering Out Web Performance Monitoring Traffic From Google Analytics

If you're a webmaster, site owner, or digital business manager, picture this scenario. You open your Google Analytics dashboard and you see a big spike in traffic. At first, you're really excited - wow, look at all those site visitors! You run off to tell your boss that she can give you that bonus she promised if you got that online marketing campaign to work. And then... you learn that someone in the Site Ops team added web performance monitors, and so it's all so-called robots - synthetic traffic generated for the purpose of keeping tabs on your site's response time and availability.

You think, no problem, I could filter that out from Google Analytics, and then you learn you can't. It's always going to be there, like, forever. You go crazy, emailing the GA team, posting on forums, and then slowly resign yourself to forever dealing with that spike. It will disappear from your default view, maybe after a month, but that's a long month to wait. And heaven forbid if your execs ask you for a site traffic report for the past year, try explaining why you can't filter out that spike - what, you weren't thinking ahead? What kind of guy did we hire to run our online business, anyway?

Don't let this happen to your career. Plan ahead and learn how to use Google Analytics to filter out all web performance monitors from your site analytics reports. Here's the link: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/2012/08/filtering-out-web-performance-monitoring-traffic-from-google-analytics.html

Monitoring the 340 Trillion Trillion Trillion: Keynote and IPv6

The Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. It shows a website's weekly average load time and download success rate (availability) on desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Let's take a look at mobile gaming, but the lessons here apply to any web sites optimizing – or not optimizing – for three screens.

The growth of mobile games is inevitable with the growth of mobile devices that enable them including feature phones, smartphones, tablets and even e-Readers. Adverse to many websites, mobile is a main focus for mobile gaming companies like Rovio.

While their desktop load speed leaves something to be desired, Rovio is the fastest social gaming site on the iPad and second fastest on the iPhone (with a speed of seven seconds). Rovio improved their site by redirecting iPad and iPhone users to a lighter, mobile optimized site. 

Papaya Mobile is another mobile gaming site, loading at a blazing 2.58 seconds on the iPhone, leveraging best practices and simply requiring a login screen as the first step to access the site. The login screen loads very quickly because of its simplicity, a great way to get your gamers on the site efficiently with minimal wait.

While most mobile gaming sites focus on their mobile speed and reliability to retain their loyal customers. Crowdsart has managed to integrate the best of mobile and desktop performance and reliability.

Crowdstar has arguably the best overall performance in the July Startup Shootout for mobile games, with a better than average desktop load speeds and 6.97 seconds to load on the smartphone. What is remarkable about the smartphone loading time is that Crowdstar brings the entire site to iPhone users, rather than offering bits of content to speed mobile interaction. If they optimized their site even further for mobile, they have the ability to achieve even faster speeds. The response time for iPad users is better than average and may end up being tolerable when connected over Wi-Fi instead of the 3G network.

Although Rovio and Papaya charge forward for quick mobile speeds to target their main demographics, leveraging best practices and monitoring slight changes in website development can give many developers the ability to optimize a better overall experience over all three screens.


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