Browser Capabilities at Google Analytics

Does this look familiar at all?

Maybe not. Even if you use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic to your business website, the Browser Capabilities section may be a part that you ignore.

You'll find this under "visitors" at your dashboard.




The colorful pictures above show the Screen Resolution, one of the choices under "Browser Capabilities." It's chock full of numbers, so if you aren't a numbers kind of person, you'll have skipped the whole thing.

Look back at it now. You'll notice that the largest number of visitors to the example site use a screen resolution of 1440x900. That's what I use, too.

If you're not sure what this means, then go to the control panel or system preferences panel of your computer and you can not only find out what screen resolution you use, but also change it around and see what that means. If you use Windows or Vista, you find the control panel by clicking on your Start icon, which is oddly enough the thing you use to shut down the computer. If you use Mac, your Apple button will take you to System Preferences.

So what? Well, if we look up at the charts again, we see that more than a quarter of the visitors are using a screen resolution of only 1024x768. There are even a few people who are using 800x600, which is like an antique computer of some kind -- or people with limited vision making their screens easier to read. There are also a few people -- those 320x396 people -- using mobile devices.

The most obvious application of this information is to design. On this example site, the designer and I were thinking about the header. There were some issues when I looked at it on my screen -- but when he showed me how it looked at the lower resolution, I saw that perfecting it for me -- and the 31.43% of the site's viewers who match me, plus the other 6% or so who use higher resolutions -- would cause issues for the 60% or so who use lower resolutions.

But this can also tell you something about your visitors. How many of them visit you on mobile devices may say something about the age or affluence level of your visitors. It may also say something about how visitors use your site -- do they look you up while they're out and about to find directions to your shop or to check out the conversations? Are they checking facts while in meetings? Or are your customers only coming to see you from their office computers?

The operating system your visitors use is another piece of information you can get. Here's our example site's breakdown:



The blue part is Windows: just over 64% of the visitors use Windows. A third of the visitors use Mac, and the little orange sliver is iPod.

This looks like an ordinary slice of well-off professional people using their home computers.

Here, for comparison, is an IT company I work with:


The blue section is still Windows -- a huge majority. Macs are the 10.37%, but the orange slice is Linux. There are also some skinny slivers of other things that are hard to see, but they add up to an amazing 80 different operating systems, including not just Chrome and Flock but Android and all kinds of other stuff, too.

The people visiting this website are probably mostly at work. And chances are they're IT guys. So the content of the second site can be much more techy than the content of the first site.

Have a look at your visitors' Browser Capabilities next time you're in Analytics. You may be able to get some insights into your visiting population that will help you not just with design, but with the kinds of blog posts and special offers you need to be creating, and the places you ought to advertise, too.