Now that you know why it can be important to see how many visitors are coming to your site from various browsers, we can take that a step further and look at a few more of the capabilities your visitors may have when viewing your site. The Browser Capabilities reports offer data on six additional system settings to consider when maximizing your visitor’s experience on your site. They include Operating Systems, Browsers and Operating System combinations, Screen Colors, Screen Resolutions, Flash Versions, and Java Support.

Operating Systems
Understanding the operating systems your visitors are using can be useful when adding new technologies or features to your site, such as pages for mobile users. If only a small percent of your visitors are coming to your site from mobile operating systems such as the iPhone or Android, maybe this is a trend to watch before spending too many resources on creating pages targeted at mobile users.

Browsers and Operating System
This report takes the previous two and combines them into one showing you what browser and operating system combinations your visitors are using. This is yet another metric to consider when doing site designs and upgrades.

Screen Colors
The screen colors setting on your visitors’ computers can have an impact on how your site looks to them. You can’t design for all possibilities, but taking into consideration what the majority has can be useful.

Screen Resolutions
Similar to Screen Colors, the Screen Resolution of your visitors effects how they are going to view your site. With screens ranging from wide screen to mini notebooks you want to optimize your site to look great on as many as possible.

Flash Versions
If you have Flash on your site or are considering adding it is good to know if most of your visitors have the capability to view your Flash features. If they have to install or upgrade software to view your site, some visitors, and maybe some conversions, may be turned away.

Java Support
This report simply tells you if Java is supported on your visitors’ platforms or not. Optimize your site to be more engaging and usable and the result can be higher conversions.

The Browser Capabilities reports may not be ones you dig into on a daily basis.  But it is good to examine these metrics every now and again to make sure your site is keeping up with your visitors’ capabilities while not outpacing them either.  Before you do any major additions or redesigns that may include the latest technologies be sure to study these reports and work to optimize your site to meet the capabilities of as many of your visitors as possible.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Network Location

Up next are the Browser Capabilities reports. This section of reports can be helpful in understanding how many visitors are affected when your site behaves differently in different browsers, with different screen resolutions, Flash versions, etc. This is good information to have when re-designing your site or adding pages. Aim to make the user experience optimal for as many of your users as possible. The first report you will find in this section is the Browsers report.

This report defaults to a pie chart graphic of the percentage of visits coming from each browser. Notice here that we received 138,803 visits from 25 different browsers. But 94.76% of those came from just two browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. So unless you have unlimited resources, there probably is not much need to try to design your site to fit all 25 browsers. The goal is to optimize the user experience of the majority of your users.

For each of the browsers listed you can drill down further to see which version of that particular browser is being used more.

Review your site in the top browsers that are bringing you visits. Look for things that are different between them and things that just don’t work in some of the browsers. These are the parts of your site you want to tweak, at least for the top couple of browsers, to make sure your site is being viewed as you intended by as many visitors as possible.  Notice the same page can behave differently based on the user’s browser.  You can see how this might impact conversion rates and sales of the third camera from the left!

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Browser Capabilities – Operating Systems & More

The last report in the Visitor Loyalty section is the Depth of Visit report. In this report “depth” is referring to the number of pages visitors are viewing.  As with the other Visitor Loyalty reports the data here is “bucketized.” Compared to the Average Pageviews report under the Visitor Trending section you may get a more realistic picture of the number of pages your visitors are viewing with Depth of Visit because you are not looking at an average of all visitors.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two reports to give you a better idea of how each presents the data and help you determine which will be better suited for your needs.

For this time period we see that the average pageviews was 3.84 pages.

But now look at the Depth of Visit report for the same time period.  When the data is “bucketized” we see that, in reality, the majority of visitors (61.57%) only viewed 1 page. The other 38.43% of visitors who visited a higher number of pages skew the average.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Browser Capabilities – Browsers