Leveraging community data - Part 1 (1)
You wake up. You decide that today you will roll out a campaign for X in Spain. You whip up the tastiest, most creative lander seen by man. You sit in your chair with a grin of utmost satisfaction as you upload it to your server. You throw that lander at BrowserStack or some VMs for a quick cross-browser compatibility check. Your heart sinks. Fucking IE *(@#$YS~! - the lander doesn't display well in IE and old versions of Opera. Recent Chrome and FF are fine. Ok, that's good because most people use Chrome and FF… right? Right?
Screw it, to a CDN it goes! Woohoo the page loads pretty fast. Wait… I'm a speed demon - so what's the best CDN to use for Spain? Does Cloudflare have PoPs there? CloudFront? What about MaxCDN? Dammit it's that CDN speed argument all over again. Why can't it be easier!
Turns out it can be! In this tutorial I will show you how to leverage freely available community data to make these decisions that little bit easier.
First up: browser compatibility. Why should we waste time optimising for IE7 on Windows Vista if few people even use it? The answer: we shouldn't. The catch: how do we know how many people use that archaic piece of crap? StatCounter!
Sticking with our spain example, go to http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-b...-201312-201402
Here we can see data on the browser versions used by desktop users over the past three months in Spain. Nearly 50% of users are using Chrome (note I have the Chrome/FF versions aggregated, you can turn this off). ~9% use IE11 and ~6% use IE8 and ~3% use IE9. Sweet, so we should probably make sure it loads alright in IE11, maybe IE8. But IE versions differ between XP/Vista/Win7/Win8 - uhh, which ones? No problem - have a look at the desktop traffic by OS as well! Over 50% are on Win7 but ~20% are on WinXP…
WinXP is able to run IE 6,7 and 8. So, some of those IE8 users we saw before were probably on XP. However, at a measly 6% we know that most XP users are using FF/Chrome. Should we tweak the lander to run fine in IE11? Definitely. IE8? Up to you. Considering these people are unlikely to be very net savvy, they are probably going to make up a small % of your clickers. Probably not worth your time.
At least now we have DATA to back up our decision.
For cross-browser compatibility testing I recommend Browserstack. I will do a tutorial related to this soon.
See Part 2: Picking the right CDN
Home > Affiliate Marketing Forum >