Google Analytics - Browser Capabilities

The Browser capabilities reporting within Google Analytics is pretty self-explanatory. Essentially, they are segmentation reports, telling you who uses which browsers and operating systems, as well as the functional capabilities (such as Flash).

Logfile-based web analytics solutions, such as AWstats, can report on the browser and OS as well of your visitors, but it takes a 'tagged' solution to read the specific capabilities of live browsers.

At first, some of this data may simply seem interesting, but not all that useful as far as getting more out of your site. For example, here is the Browser report, providing a cross-section of your web visitors, and which major Browser they're using:

Now, can this data actually be used for anything, (besides perhaps cheering Firefox on for obtaining almost 20% of traffic)? Well, one thing this report is great for, is ensuring that you're still designing for cross-browser compatibility. For example, I recently redesigned a website, and it had a bug when displayed in IE. They weren't all that concerned, until I showed them that over half of their visitors were using IE, and therefore unable to navigate properly. So, this placed some urgency on the bug fix!

Available Reports

You can obtain the following reports:

• Browsers
• Operating Systems
• Browsers and OS
• Screen Colors
• Screen Resolutions
• Flash Versions
• Java Support

When you navigate to each of them, you are first presented with the major versions, such as when you click on the Operating Systems report:

You can then click on an item to drill down to segment by product version numbers. Here you can see the cross-section of visitors using various versions of Windows (I guess Vista just isn't taking off...):

You can also click the "Goal Conversions" tab to segment your different users by their performance. For example, I see that the Windows users have a higher conversion rate than Mac users.  This can be attributed to the fact that this particular site is geared towards business technology, and people are more likely to be using a PC at work, whereas perhaps they are just researching the products on their Mac at home.  Of course, if you optimize your site for your more prominent OS/browser segments, you're bound to have higher conversion rates.

Another application for these reports is if you're promoting specific ads or affiliate products on your website. If your visitors are largely IE/Windows users, you may be successful promoting a Registry Cleaning tool. However, if your visitors are mostly using Mac, you'd be better off promoting something like the Google Toolbar or desktop.

These reports are also extremely useful when it comes to designing splash pages and promotions on your site. Maybe marketing wants to create some sort of interactive Flash piece on your site. But if a large percentage of your visitors don't run Flash, you can make the case for an HTML alternative. As well, as you gather data over time, you can compare conversion rates to see which segments perform better, to validate future Flash vs. HTML discussions in the future.

So as you can see, these reports are pretty straightforwards, somewhat basic. But interpreting the results can provide the needed information to make critical design and implementation decisions!