Stats Sources – StatCounter

Here at Beta Breakers QA Labs, we rely on a number of different sources for industry information – this helps us make decisions on what hardware to purchase for our labs, what the general shape of various hardware/software markets look like, and helps us advise our partners and clients on what their support requirements should look like in a general sense.  A couple of these sources come up a lot, so we’re taking a few minutes to discuss them; today we’re looking at StatCounter.

Important Note:  each source has built-in biases and limitations that need to be taken into account when looking at data.  In StatCounter’s case, it’s a web analytics service that relies, in part, on a tracking code that must be installed on individual partner sites; it doesn’t measure the entirety of the Internet, or claim to.  It does reflect a diverse sampling of ~1.5 million sites, which make up a sample group of billions of monthly page views, and even has a nice discussion of sampling methodology available in their FAQ.

We really love StatCounter as an easy breakdown of desktop, mobile and web browser market shares.  Especially important is the ability to look at things geographically/regionally – the North American market in which we are located and most familiar with on a day-to-day basis isn’t always representative of the rest of the world, so a source that surfaces this information on-demand is often of great use.

StatCounter’s basic view packs in a lot of information, sometimes more than is easy to discern at a glance.  Fortunately, they support a lot of customizations to how the data is visualized, allowing you to turn data bits on and off as needed to focus in on the ones that are of most interest.  They also pack in some cool customizations for the chart if you want to take the time – one of our favorites is viewing the data globally:

Above shows the share of mobile browsers viewed globally; we were going to look at overall share, but that’s a very boring shade of universal green, because Chrome is just that popular.  In this view, you can even mouse over individual countries and see a more detailed breakdown as a tooltip, making it both cool and useful.  The only downside is that the map view only supports a maximum of a 3-month scale of data, rather than the usual full year.

While StatCounter is far from the only source of web usage data available, it is quite comprehensive, broad, and deep; Beta Breakers QA labs especially likes the ability to filter data geographically, which is very important for us when planning website testing efforts outside of our home location, and even just for planning in general – it never hurts to keep a broad perspective of what users may be running, even (perhaps especially) when you are not planning support for a specific population.