Recently, I wrote a post posing the question, Is IE6 dead? I described how critical it is for web designers and clients to understand who is visiting their site. Only by analysing the statistics available for site traffic, or estimating it for new sites, is it possible to decide whether or not to cater for older technology.

In this post, I will show you seven things to look out for in your statistical data, and what they will tell you about your site visitors.

Tools

There’s a range of analytics tools available. The current industry standard is Google Analytics. It is easy to set up and use and provides a fairly comprehensive data set from which information can be gathered.

Google develops the tool constantly to ensure it meets the requirements of web developers and other users. This provides additional functionality available for ‘advanced users’, making it a flexible working tool for most web sites.

This is the tool I use for analysing the traffic to my own websites.

Analysis

I regularly check the statistics for my sites and it is through this analysis that I make decisions about how to develop my sites in the future. It might be useful to share some of the key findings from one of my sites with you as an ongoing series of posts to show how I might change my site as a result of these stats. Here are seven things to watch.

1. Browser use

The biggest question on people’s minds at the moment is whether or not designers should still spend time on workarounds for Internet Explorer 6. The position I have taken in previous posts is that the statistics for a particular site should tell you whether or not this is necessary.

My statistics for May 2009 show some interesting results. IE only catered for a total of 18% of visitors, whereas Firefox catered for a whopping 58%. Safari catered for 13% of visitors.

Delving further into this shows that the majority of Firefox users were using the latest version of the browser (3.0.10); although there was some latent use of earlier versions. Of  IE users, 15% of all visitors were using IE7 and 3% IE8. None of my visitors were using IE6 during May 2009. Good news! If this persists, I would consider it reasonable to remove support for IE6 as a browser from this site. I won’t base this decision on one month’s findings though (last month showed 9% of traffic used IE6).

2. Screen resolutions

Screen resolution remains an issue, especially with mobile browser technology gaining ground. My analytics shows that all my visitors are using large screen resolutions, which suggests I’m not getting mobile browsers or people using small (old) screens. I may wish to look to improving mobile browser experience on my site in the future as this is a growing segment of the market.

3. Flash versions

If your site uses flash, you can also gather some information about the versions of the flash viewer that your visitors are using. This could be useful when developing your site to ensure that they function correctly for your users. As my site does not use flash, this is not important for me at this stage, although it may be a useful resource if I am asked to build a flash site for a client.

4. Java support

As Google runs on javascript, it does not have a data set showing how many visitors didn’t have javascript enabled; all visitors identified in Google are javascript enabled. For this reason, it is always useful to compare raw visitor figures against those obtained from your hosting service or another source. Any differences should show how many visitors had javascript disabled in their browsers.

Google does tell you how many visitors had Java supported on their platform. In my case, 10% of visitors did not have Java supported, which is quite a significant number and might affect any applications I wished to develop in the future.

5. Connection speeds

You might be forgiven for believing that today everyone uses broadband and therefore connection speed is not important. However, for a site that predominantly uses images or multimedia, this is still a factor to consider (and not all areas of the world have high-speed broadband connections).

May 2009 data suggests there are still a small percentage of visitors using dialup. Google was not able to identify the connection speed of 35% of visitors to my site, which means a larger proportion of visitors could be disadvantaged by bandwidth munching files.

6. Country of origin

Something I always find fascinating is where visitors come from. Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of my site visitors come from the UK, USA and Europe. There are a number of visitors from other countries and this could lead me to think more about the number of conversions that are lost through not supporting native languages. Google provides further analysis on bounce rates (the number of people leaving the site on the first page) and time spent on site, which I have not covered here. Together these figures could lead me to improve my site translation.

7. Sources of traffic

Analytics can aid understanding from where people have landed on your site. This provides a useful analysis for the value of ad campaigns, search results, link value, etc. My data shows that I have had a number of hits from Google organic searches (from search requests), from direct hits (typing the address into the browser), from social media, such as Twitter and LinkedIn and from other referrals, blogs and listings.

Conclusions

A vast array of information can be obtained from simple data. This post just touches the surface of what you can gather about the usability of your site from your visitors. Check out Google Analytics for yourself and see what surprising information it can tell you.