Thread

Hi all,

I use a theme from WooThemes at one of my sites, and they place the Google Analytics tracking-code at the very bottom of the pages, just before the closing body-tag as shown at the end of this post.

However Google says the tracking-code should be placed just before the closing head-tag, when you read their documentation on the Analytics website.

I see EllisLab places the code at the bottom here on the forum-pages, just like the WooTheme does, but they place it at the top as Google recommends on the front-page for example.

So my question is: Is there anything special when running EE, that makes it better to have the tracking-code at the bottom? Or does it not matter the least? If it doesn’t matter, it seems strange that so many EE-sites have it in another place than Google recommends. So I bet there is a good reason behind this, and I’d love to learn more about it.

So if anyone has the time to explain this to me, I’d be very grateful 😊

EXAMPLE FROM A WOO-THEME:

... footer code above this ...

[removed]

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-TEST-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s[removed].insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

[removed]
</body>
</html>

IMHO there is no “EE-requirement” in this case.  I was just looking at this issue for a client and it looks like the header was considered a more accurate view.

OK, thank you very much for making me stop wondering about this one 😊

Cheers,
Thomas

Google used to recommend putting it in the footer because it wanted to log only those pages that fully displayed in a browser. It now recommends the header. But that leaves open the question of whether you want to log pages that are only part-way open before someone leaves them again.

I’d say it’s always best to do what Google tells you to do, or else suffer the consequences… 😉

Does this not depend on what type of tracking you use?

With the traditional snippet, you have two options depending on how your site is built:

We generally recommend that you place the Google Analytics tracking code immediately before the closing </body> tag of your pages in order to avoid any issues with page loading delays for visitors with slow connection speeds.

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55574
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html

While when hen using asynchronous JavaScript the recommendation is before </head>:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html

So since you use the latter the answer is to put it before </head>.

Correct me if I am wrong.