Here’s Google’s suggestion to address the lag issue. Seems more like a band-aid to me, but perhaps they’re still dealing with the higher-than-expected volume.
Hello Travis,
Thank you for your email. We’ve noticed that some users’ networks have a
hard time contacting Google Analytics in order to communicate your traffic
information. To prevent your page load time from slowing, we recommend
that you place your tracking code at the bottom of your page, before the (/body)
tag. This will allow your entire page contents to load before
needing to communicate with Google Analytics.
Makes a fair amount of sense, not putting it in the footer which would increase the likelihood of someone clicking elsewhere before analytics loads. Still, i can’t help but wonder how much this will skew my statistics.
Now to see how much of a chore it’s going to be to place the analytics code before the closing “body” tag on all these dynamic sites…
