Why do tracking/analytics companies want their code placed at the top of the page (meaning below the opening tag) to be properly tracked? If a user exits quickly they should not be tracked.  It seems quite duplicitous to track a user that has exited a page before it has even finished loading.   Granted if you have a site that takes a bit to load you shouldn’t wait till everything on the page loads, otherwise you’d never realize that your page load time results in lost visitors.  But if a user exits a page or clicks away very quickly that visit doesn’t really count.  It would be like Nielsen tracking every channel I skip when I surf TV using the channel up button.

I also simply can not believe it when a tracking company claims that their code will not be guaranteed to work if placed in the <head> of the document or if the code is wrapped inside a generic tracking function.  If your code can’t be wrapped or placed in the <head> what did you do wrong in the first place, or what kind of tricks are you trying to pull? I don’t like to always use the exact code provided by these companies when working on a client website.  Your client’s needs for analytics may result in them changing tracking companies and then the developer would be forced to make widespread changes across a site to deal with such change.  Granted this type of change is not all that frequent, but it does happen and being prepared is far easier than redoing work.

I’m also not convinced that the analytics provided by many companies is accurate enough.  I’ve seen on many occasions that raw stats provide disparaging numbers when put against 3rd party companies and even between multiple 3rd party tracking companies when used together on the same page.  When the numbers of hits you receive on your site is the means for convincing ad placement or other financing I think that accuracy is quite important.

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