Microsoft Falls, Apple Rises

For many years I’ve combed through our website analytics looking for trends in visits, search terms and more. When Google Analytics came on the scene I jumped on it and it’s been a useful tool in my arsenal ever since.

For what it’s worth, I was particularly struck by two of our sites today when, as a team, we got together and discussed our analytics, advertising and other measurements for our businesses.

It was very enlightening. 

Web Browser Access: Microsoft is Down, Apple & Chrome are Up

One of our businesses, The Trend Curve, has a high number of corporate-types as customers and prospects so Internet Explorer has always been the dominant web browser used to access our website. Firefox was always a close and growing browser option as Microsoft had issues over the years with Internet Explorer, and when Google came on the scene with their Chrome browser it was amazing how quickly it leapt ahead of Firefox in our website access logs.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Mac browser Safari was 34%, IE (all versions) was 25%, and Chrome and Firefox were tied for 18% of our overall web traffic. Though this mirrors my own experience with more and more people I know moving to the other browsers than IE as their preferred browsing experience, it still somewhat stunning. 

Another “labor-of-love” site I run with three buddies, Minnov8, covers primarily internet-specific innovation in the State of Minnesota. While we were aware that our skewed-toward-geeks audience members had long ago embraced the Chrome browser on Mac, Windows and Linux, my surprise came when I dug in to the browser breakdown even further than I did on The Trend Curve website data.

Doing so I discovered that our Minnov8 browser mix was Chrome at 34% (half of those on Windows, half on Mac), Safari 24% (half on Mac, half on iOS), Firefox 20% (63% Windows, 37% Mac) and all versions of Internet Explorer (yes, there were three visits through the ancient IE 6) was only a paltry 18%. Wow. I guess technical folks find Internet Explorer wanting. Perhaps this will change with Windows 8 and IE 10 out now so I’ll have to revisit this in a few months.

In both cases Microsoft Internet Explorer was always the dominant browser in all of our analytics and had been for years.

Mobile Device Access: It’s All Apple

The big headlines from our viewing of mobile device access didn’t come as much of a surprise since Apple is so incredibly dominant with mobile devices:

• 86% of mobile devices accessing www.trendcurve.com were iPads (53%), iPhones (32%) and iPod Touches (1%). The other 14% was comprised of 22 other devices (Android were 20 of them and 2 were Blackberry)

• 83% of mobile devices accessing www.Minnov8.com was interesting since iPads and iPhones flipped their use but the total was virtually identical with iPhones (51%), iPads (31%) and iPod Touches (1%). The other 17% was comprised of 14 other devices (Android were 11 of them and 3 were Blackberry).

While I know this data is not a revelation in the global internet and its use, but it personally validated what I’d read, studies I’ve seen and all of the experiences I’ve had: regardless of what the tech pundits say, Apple is extremely dominant with tablets and smartphones, its market share is accelerating dramatically with desktop and laptop computer use, and that Microsoft continues to decline in virtually every measure when it comes to the web and mobile.

To learn more:

• Usage share of web browsers (wikipedia)
• W3 Counter for Sept 2012 – great site that shows web browser, operating system, countries and screen resolutions of people browsing the web and shows that we’re not the only ones seeing a continual downtrending of the usage of Internet Explorer in all its flavors.