Screen Resolutions metric

The site was developed to be appealing to the international audience. When I got to Screen Resolutions I noticed that the major group of visitors who were accessing the site used screen resolution of 800X600 pixels, or as you already guessed, mostly 15-inch monitors. But there was not a single monitor of that size at the company which owned the web site. When I opened the site in my own spare 15-inch monitor that I keep for the testing purposes, I was appalled at the ugly view of web pages. It was a completed chaos, because the developers did not take into consideration the needs of Internet visitors.

Naturally, after I reported my findings everything was corrected. And after a while the bounce rate went down. I also learned an important lesson that Screen Resolutions metric can be invaluable when you try to fulfill the concept of the user-friendly web site.

I was going to finish my article on this note but then remembered another useful thing that this metric can help you with. It is a hint. If you see that a lot of visitors who access the site have lower than 800X600 resolution, that might mean that searchers with mobile devices are coming to your web site. So be prepared to launch a site version that is compatible with these mobile devices, like cell phones.

There is an interesting metric in Google Analytics

There is an interesting metric in Google Analytics and similar web analytics software. Web analysts tend to pass it over but this metric will give you an interesting insight into the world of your Internet visitors. In Google Analytics this metric is called Screen Resolutions. You can get to it if you click on Visitors and then Browser Capabilities.

I have an interesting story to tell about this metric. Not so long ago my fellow analyst asked me to help him conduct the analysis of the site with the declining traffic. It looked quite bizarre to my colleague because the site was recently launched into production, it had all great keywords and leading search engines indexed each and every page that they could find.

Visually that web site looked nice too. Maybe, designers made it too colorful to my taste, but that site was oriented on young audience and had all possible bells and whistles and link baiting hooks that anybody could ask for.

The launching was announced on many prominent blogs and link building campaign seemed to be successful too. Yet, after a while the bounce rate started to rise until it reached whopping ninety percent. Naturally, the in house SEO specialist conducted all kinds of tests but could not find any faults with the site except for minor things here and there that were fixed instantly. But all these measure did not help.

I agreed to help the guys and noticed that my colleagues researched thoroughly almost every bit of stats. Almost but not all ... They forgot to look at this metric that I was talking about in the beginning of my article – Screen Resolutions.

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