[New Feature]: Conduct Browser-Size Analysis Within Google Analytics

We’re pleased to announce a new tool for optimizing your site’s content: browser-size analysis, which is part of the In-Page Analytics report.

Browser Size

Today’s visitors to websites are using an ever-growing number of devices. Many users are on mobile platforms, and although desktop monitors are getting bigger, browsers aren’t necessarily following suit. For many people, the visible portion of the web page is much smaller than the screen resolution, because of excessive toolbars and other clutter.

What is actually “above the fold” on a web page is a significant factor to conversion rates. If visitors have to scroll to see an “add to cart” button, or some other critical element, they may never get around to it. Analyzing the percentage of visitors for whom page elements fall beneath the fold or off to one side is difficult, so we've created a visualization that lets you quickly determine which portions of your page are visible to which percentages of visitors.

Simply navigate to the Content section in Google Analytics, and click In-Page Analytics. A new information layer is available (we’re rolling out the feature gradually over the next few weeks, so please be patient if you don’t see it yet!). Click Browser Size to shade portions of the page that are below the fold. You can now click anywhere on the screen to see what percentage of visitors can see it, or control the threshold percentage by using the slider.


Conversion insight

Click Show percentiles to see a summary visualization of several different percentiles. This helps you understand how browser sizes are distributed--for example, if you choose to compare All Visitors with the Mobile traffic segment, you should see a substantial difference. You can also use this technique to compare different pages on your site. For example, if users on your goal page appear to have larger browsers than those on your landing page, this is a strong indicator that you are losing conversions because some pages in the funnel are not laid out in an optimal manner.

By default, the report shows you data based on the current page you are viewing (and the active advanced segment). You can use the picker to also view data for “visitors to the site” or “Web users” so you can compare it to different benchmarks. Note that these modes disregard advanced segments. The Web data source is aggregated by Google over many users.


Graduation

You may have used an earlier iteration of this tool at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/. Now that the lab has succeeded and we’re offering a more powerful for your own site tool within Google Analytics, we will be sunsetting the original tool in approximately one month.

Posted by Gaal Yahas, Google Analytics team

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