In my recent talk with Rajesh Ghatge on the effectiveness of the online marketing programs, we discussed at length adherence (or lack of it) to the basic logic of pre-testing campaigns across browsers platforms before their deployment. The logic is very simple; however, it is often overlooked due to over dependency on IE as the default browser. Most marketers tend to disregard the campaign effectiveness on other browsers, due to their own usage patterns.
After our chat, I did spend a little time on looking at the back-end of my own blog (The BTL Life) to try and test the logic and was quite taken aback by the browser mix. This pie chart shows the distribution of the browsers used to visit this blog.
I was expecting a higher IE% (and not because I am an IE user), however, the site stats got collaborated by other 3rd party browser stats, which are pointing towards a significant increase in the Fx users (42%) and now a 3% now on Chrome. Read more about Browser Stats here.
Pre-deployment testing across all browsers formats is now more critical than ever. It is basic yet critical. Also not to be overlooked are campaign’s compatibility / effectiveness on parameters like Java scripts versions, monitor resolution and colour depth – all these can make your great campaign look rather silly on certain machines. While global averages may not always be relevant to every online deployment as different campaigns would attract different audiences (and hence hardware and software type), however, it is important to address all browser formats and ensure cross-browser compliance. Thanks to a number of tools and sites, this is easy to ensure. One could use sites like www.browsershots.com which report on site compatibility across browsers.
