Few days ago, Google Analytic released a new code that is much faster than the old one, check it out:
We’re happy to announce that the asynchronous tracking tag, which came out of beta last week, is now available in your admin interface when you set up a new profile. This makes it easy for everyone to start off tracking new sites with this very fast, state-of-the-art tag.
Whether you’re tracking a single domain, or a more complex site with multiple subdomains or top level domains, there’s an option in the interface to give you exactly the code you need.
Simply select the scenario that fits your needs. The admin interface now provides the asynchronous tracking code by default, but if you need the traditional tracking snippet you can find it here.
Source: new Google analytic code
Why this is so important?
This really is a big deal. The previous tracking script had an inherent problem, it would drag down the load time of the page. If you placed it at the top of your code, the rest of your page wouldn’t load until the script finished phoning home. If you placed it on the bottom, you risked losing data if a user navigated away from the page before it had finished rendering.
How often was this happening? I suspect that it was pretty widespread. How often have you visited a page that seems to be fully rendered, but the browser shows that the page is still loading (sometimes for what seems like several minutes)? This is often a GA script that is having trouble making the connection back to Google’s servers.
The asynchronous tag does away with that problem. I seperates the server connection from the rest of the page load, so it will not delay the loading of the page. You can safely put the tag at the top of code without worrying about affecting load time or not being able to track the session.
