Page Load Timings: How accurate is Google Analytics Data?

[_Heiko_]

Hello Guys,

what are your experiences? How accurate is google analytics data regarding page load times?

I know that one of my sites has trouble with pageload times, especially in India and USA. We are based in middle Europe and regarding to the GA data we have here in middle europe of about 2 seconds page load time. Moreover we have of about 4 seconds in USA and 10 seconds in India.

Therefore I decided to test for a few sides a CDN (on these pages all static files are served over the CDN). However, first GA data indicates, that the page load times are even getting worse!!! But when I test it for example with pingdom (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/) and compare it with an old landing page without CDN implementation, the tool says it's faster. The CDN provider (maxcdn) send me also some reports, which indicate, that the page load time should be faster...That's the reason why I ask about your experience with the GA page load time data, because personally I get the impression you cannot trust the data...

Thanks for your help!

Cheers

[-Ash-]

Google also offers "Page Speed Insights" that will give you an analysis of what can improve load times.

[_Heiko_]

We have there pretty good scores (90+), but that's not really location related...

[Bio-RadAbs]

I'm interested to know answer to this question too. I'm about to introduce a CDN as our company is a global one and i'm hoping a CDN would reduce the page load time and thus reduce the average load time GA reports..

Curious why GA is recording worse for you.