Browsers and Coversion Rates

[Brett_Tabke]

One tid bit I picked up in London was that some people find that browser make has a great deal to do with conversion rates. Someone suggested that the conversion rate for Netscape v4 users was significantly higher than that for IE users. The theory is that many older execs and upscale users are still using NN4.

Anyone ever do any studies along that lines? (can't say that I have).

[rogerd]

Interesting thought, I suppose someone with a large e-commerce site and good tracking could comment. None of my sites can cough up that stat at the moment.

The only browser/personality link I can recall is a side-splitting comment by someone after WebTV users began to spill onto the net: "... WebTV users make aol.com visitors look like they came from mensa.org!" (AOL users, of course, had been the previous butt of much ridicule.)

[edit_g]

Lol- thats very true rogerd. Seriously though- the way some ecommerce sites look in NN4 nobody would touch them with a ten foot barge pole...

[txbakers]

NN4 needs to go away. If these upscale and executive users want to continue to use it, they should find less and less sites that will work.

[rogerd]

>>NN4 needs to go away.<<

Amen to that. I just spent a few hours tweaking the CSS on a client's site because his IT director, of all people, still uses NN4. He was surprised by the stats I gave him that showed about 4% NN4 users, since "most of the people he knows" use it. :)

[Hawkgirl]

Brett, I'm off to run some reports to see if this is true for us. This is a fascinating idea.

Actually, if this is true I think we need to caveat it - I'd say that conversion would only be better in this case if you have a site that is of high interest to these execs. My consumer-focused services probably won't convert as well for them as a business service would.

[ScottM]

As for NN4 users, I have a fairly large percentage of them in my logs.

In particular these come from .edu .gov and .mil users....which does indeed support the 'disposable income' theory. (Professors, teachers, the military and civil citizens.)

[tedster]

One person I spoke with at PubCon had a site where the "movers and shakers" in his market niche were heavily NN4/Macintosh. They were the ones making recommendations. So, even though they were only around 2-3% of his visitors, by his figures they actually drive over half the sales.

Before he figured this out, he was just clunking along. When he took it into account earlier this year, his site really took off.

I doubt this applies very strongly to a general public e-commerce site. But for sites that have a specific niche, and especially a technical/engineering one, I'd do the research.

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Netscape just released version 4.8 of their browser, almost simultaneously with version 7.0.

That's an important fact - why would they offer an upgrade/patch to a dinosaur? Netscape knows something about certain market niches, especially certain corporate IT Departments who long ago committed their networks to NN4 and will not upgrade until they have the time and resources to check out all the holes opened up by the new DOM.

Most sites get a lot of "from-work" users - on their lunch hour, I'm certain ;) If you don't give something workable to the NN4 user, you may be missing an opportunity. And, it may be hard to tell, unless you dig into your logs and possibly do some interviewing.

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I was just checking out the new design at Wired.com. You know what? I preferred the Nielsen-esque experience on Netscape 4.77 to the fat downloads on IE6.

More and more, I usually want my information, not the design departments latest bit of self-indulgence. And hats off to Wired for that make-over.

[edit_g]

We were admiring the wired site the other day also. I was going "look- no tables" and our designer said "try it with netscape and see it fail". I fired it up and it looked great- everything was easy to read- it looked old school but was really user friendly. Now if only I knew how to use CSS that well... ;)

Edit- there was also some suggestion that they were cloaking to deliver different code to different user agents-hence it looking good in NN4- I didn't see any evidence of cloaking though.

[David]

NN 4x usage a year ago was 12% for me and is now about 5.5%. Actual conversion rates have always been slightly higher. Page Views however are 15% to 20% above IE. I have always thought it was because so many sites don't rendor well for them.

I upgraded one box from NN 4.7 to 4.8 and on the first load it prompted me to upgrade to 7.0. I wondered if this was part of there plan.