As Google continues to use website loading speed as a signal of website quality for ranking purposes, Google Analytics has added a site speed indicator to reporting. This is a big win for users of Google Analytics. Not only will we be able to see how page loading times are potentially affecting our SEO efforts, but we will also be able to see how it affects the user experience and conversion rates over time.

Google lists the following as uses for the Site Speed Report:
- Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
- Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
- Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
- Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

Using tools such as Firebug, PageSpeed and YSlow (all Firefox plugins) website owners can identify which parts of the page are slowing down the load time. Being able to view how site speed correlates to conversions and then tweaking pages for speed and seeing how that affects conversion will be a great tool in the internet marketers toolbag.

This will be particularly useful for landing pages for Adwords and other paid advertising, and also key pages in the shopping process for e-commerce merchants, allowing online marketers to more clearly see if page load speed is a factor in where the holes are in the sales funnel.

To get Site Speed working for you, there a a couple of set up things to do. Firstly, if you’re not already using the asynchronous tracking code for your Google Analytics, now is the time to switch over to it. Then you just need to make sure that you have an extra piece of tracking code ‘_trackPageLoadTime();’. And you’re done! For more detailed set up instructions, check out Google’s Help page.