Collecting More Page Speed Measurements with Google Analytics

Google Analytics defaults to collecting 1% of page speed measurements. This may be helpful if you have a large amount of visitors but for most websites this is far too low. Let’s increase this number to get more data points.

If you have your Google Analytics set up with Google Tag Manager, you can add a new variable called “siteSampleSpeed” and set it the percent you’d like to collect (i.e. 100.)

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to Google Tag Manager. Click on the container for your site.
2. Click on the Tag panel
3. Click on the tag used for your Google Analytics Universal Analytics. This will open a panel
4. Click on the “Tag Configuration” block to open editing capabilities
5. Make sure “Enable overriding settings in this tag” is checked
6. Then click “More Settings”
7. Then click “Fields to Set”
8. In the field name, type “SiteSpeedSampleRate” and set the value to 100
9. Save the tag
10. Publish the changes

Google limits the number of site speed samples to 10,000 per day per property. If you have a large number of visitors you may not be able to see every visitor’s data.