Do You Know What Your Site Looks Like to a USR? Part 2

In part one, we discussed how to know what your site looks like in different screen resolutions and different browsers. So now you can take a look at your site with the different tools, do your estimations for the different browsers, and see where you would have to put your amazing video for a visitor to see it immediately upon viewing your website if he has Firefox and 800×600 resolution.

But – how many people visit your site from Firefox with an 800×600 resolution?  Enough to justify changing your site layout for them?  Let’s take a look at how you can find out the exact specs of the people who visit your site – their resolution and their browsers – so you can make wise decisions about site design.

We’re going to use Google Analytics to do this.  If for some reason you don’t have it on your site – stop reading this and go install it.  It’s free and it gives you amazing amounts of actionable information – if you know how to get the right info out of its hundreds of reports.

One of the most useful things about Analytics is its Custom Reports feature – where you can design your own report, and you can set it up with several layers, so that you can see data from one layer (say, how many visitors came from Asia vs. Europe) and then go into the next sub-layer and see its data (go into Asia and see how many Asian visitors came through the keyword “cakes” vs. “cookies” – then go back into Europe and see how many European visitors came via “cakes” vs. “cookies”).

That custom report when set up would look like this:

See – You’re going to see visitors by continent, and then by keyword within each continent.

So what do we do in our case, where we want to see the browsers and resolutions of our visitors?

How about a report like this?

Here you get to see the visitors who came with a particular screen resolutions, and then see how many from each browser with that screen resolution – and then how many for each browser version per browser. (Yes – I will show you how to make this report at the end of the post.)

What does this report look like when you view it?

So let’s take a look.  Click on the 1366×768 at the top.  Now you get this view:

So click on Internet Explorer – the only browser where version really matters (for the purposes of seeing how much room you have on your webpage before a visitor has to scroll).

Now you get this view:

So now what do you do?  Let’s make the estimate, as we said in the last post, that Chrome and IE9 have about the same amount of room, and Firefox and IE7&8 have about the same amount of room.  So for the screen resolution of 1366×768, we get 63 visitors from Chrome/IE9 and 64 visitors from Firefox/IE7&8.

Over here they came out about equal – and then you have to make the decision: what does that mean for my website design?  Is it important to design with both in mind?  But this was just the top screen resolution.  It pays to look at some of the other of the top screen resolutions sending you traffic and do the same calculation for them.  When you have all the visitor information (bearing in mind that things will change – for example, IE9 visitors will probably increase and IE8 decrease over time), then you can make intelligent decisions about webpage design and redesign.

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Okay, now the instructions on how to make that custom report for your site.  We’re going to give the instructions in the new Google Analytics interface, but you can make the same report in the old one, if you like using that better.

Go into Google Analytics and click on “Custom Reports” in the top menu bar.

The Custom Reports tab will open.

Here’s how to create your custom report:

Now let’s add your dimensions – number of unique visitors per what?

Does it look like the example of the report we brought at the beginning? Fantastic! Now don’t forget to press save, and you’re done!

Related posts:

1. Do You Know What Your Website Looks Like to a USR?