Google™ Analytics 2.0

Chapter 15. Browser Capabilities

Web design parameters are the different factors that affect the way users see your web site. And those parameters can have a huge impact on the number of visitors who come onto your site and bounce right back off or who stick around, browsing and reading the content that you’ve provided.

One goal of your site should be to make visitors stick around for a little while — at least until they reach one of the goals that you’ve set for your site. But if your site is hard to use, doesn’t render well, or frustrates users for any reason, they will leave. The reports in the Browser Capabilities section of Google Analytics help you to see how different aspects of your site design and structure could affect how your visitors see, and use, your web site.

Browser

Web site design affects how the site renders in different browsers. For example, some web sites are best viewed with an Internet Explorer browser. If you try to view those sites using a non–Internet Explorer browser, such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari, very often the page won’t display properly. Sometimes it’s graphics that won’t show up. Other times the graphics show up but the text behaves badly.

To prevent an issue with having a site that’s not designed well for all of the users who visit, the Browsers report, shown in Figure 15-1, shows what browsers most frequently accessed your web site in a given time frame. This enables you to see at a glance how your visitors viewed your site.

Figure 15-1. Browsers ...