Website Statistics Report: Web-Browsers

Overview

This report shows the web-browsers (or browsers) that visitors to your website use. Web-browsers are the applications that visitors use to view websites, typically running on a personal computer of some kind, such as a Windows, Apple or Unix/Linux based machine. However, increasingly these also include mobile based devices and their associated embedded web-browser, Pocket IE for example. You can find this information in the Operating Systems and Screen Resolutions reports.

Most major web-browsers are, in theory anyway, built to a commonly defined standard (wwc3), and so should all render your website in exactly the same way. In practice however this is not the case and each has their own peculiarities from how HTML is rendered to JavaScript behaviour. Additionally mobile type devices sometimes do not have all the features of their fully fledged PC based versions. Therefore it is important to test your website with a range of web-browsers to make sure you are not alienating a potential segment of the internet by having your website not work correctly in their favourite web-browser.

You can use this report to see which browsers you should be testing your website against. You can also use it to spot trends in the “browser wars” that have been raging on since the first web-pages. How is Firefox doing against Microsoft Internet Explorer for example?

An example of the web-browser report is shown below:

WebVisitor.Info Web-Browsers Report example

Report Options

As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.

Additionally you can choose to show all web-browsers by their version numbers.

How this Report Works with the Log

Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.

To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

The search terms that are used to direct visitors to your website from the Search Engine are only available on the first page the visitor views from the website. Because of the nature of the Internet this could be any page within your website, therefore to get the most out of this report it is essential that you make sure you have installed the tracking code on every page of your website.

Other than that, by ensuring that your log is as big as possible you won’t lose any data once your log becomes full.