Web Site Measurement Hacks

Measure Browser Plug-ins

If you’re developing any advanced functionality that requires external plugins, you should use your web measurement application to make sure your visitors have the right plug-ins installed.

Understanding the plug-ins your visitors use helps guide web site technology decisions. For example, if only 20 percent of your visitors have RealPlayer support, you may consider offering videos in other formats such as QuickTime or Windows Media. You may be looking at research data to understand plug-in penetration. Research data is a starting point, but you will want to check your own web site visitors. For example, a software company web site may have a much higher concentration of advanced plug-ins than a generic search portal.

Determining which plug-ins are installed on a visitor’s browser is difficult, because each browser works differently. Before Internet Explorer became so popular, you could easily get a list of plug-ins by accessing the navigator. plug-ins array, which contains all of the installed plug-ins for Netscape and Mozilla-based browsers. The problem with Internet Explorer is that it does not provide a list of plug-ins. Instead, you basically ask the browser about each plug-in.

Ask the Browser

To detect and track a plug-in with Internet Explorer, you will need to add some code to your page—usually JavaScript, but in some cases VBScript—and pass in the information to a variable or URL of your web measurement application (note that some vendors have this ...