In recent analysis of a variety of OPA members, I’ve figured out that sites with higher percentages of dial-up visitors are seeing a drop in their stats. Comparing trends to Google Analytics and other measurement tools, it would appear that the Google Analytics code is taking quite a long time to run on slow connections…this means that people are leaving the page before the Nielsen tag has the opportunity to process.
A formal announcement will follow, but please get your techies to swap your tags around so that - if you are running Google Analytics (or any other tag-based measurement tool) - they run in this order:
<!— Nielsen Tag —>
<! Google Analytics Tag –>
</body>
By doing this across the board, we’ll get a standard measurement approach for all OPA member sites.
More to come from Measurement in the coming weeks!