Browser Size – A Valuable Analytics Tool Or Another Google Waste Of Time?
Google are forever producing tools that webmasters can use to analyze their web sites. The latest release is Google Browser Size. Is it a valuable analytics tool or another toy that wastes time? At the risk of getting more splinters in my rear – I’ll sit on the fence and say both.
If you know what you are looking for and know what you are looking at, it can be a quick visualisation of what visitors to your site see. This can be valuable information, particularly if you are getting high bounce rates. Today’s web sites need to engage visitors’ attention immediately. We all know that the human eye is pulled to the upper left of the screen – what does the upper left of your page look like?
Let’s take a step back and look at how the tool works. Enter the URL of the page you want to view and Google Browser Size will show the page with an overlay. This overlay gives you a view in percentage of terms of what most people see first when the page loads. You can scroll down the page and the overlay will continue to provide that information.
Used in conjunction with other tools such as goal tracking, you can trial various placements of important components of your web page. If certain actions are not being performed by your visitors, check where they are placed on the screen. You may need to move the action call to another location highlighted by this tool. Goal tracking can then help to measure the performance.
Used in the right hands, this can be a valuable tool. As an analytics tool, it does provide a very quick visual view of what your visitors see. Beyond that, it is really just a toy.
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