Every time a request is made to your website, the user’s browser sends a “User-Agent” string with information about the platform making the request. Here is an example of the User-Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7

If you look closely, you will see that the string contains information about the user’s operating system, browser, and the name of the device they are using (if it has a name).

While seeing the number of people that arrive to your site that are still using Netscape is interesting (and surprising), it’s not particularly actionable. What you really need to do is get this information out of Google Analytics and into your customer database. By storing User-Agent in your customer database, you can do some great stuff:

1. Figure out exactly where to spend your money

By saving user device and browser data from Google Analytics to your customer database, you’ll start to get a very clear picture on how your most valuable customers interact with your website. Hopefully, you already know what your most successful customer acquisition channels are and have adjusted your marketing spend accordingly. How would your marketing strategy change if you knew your best customers arrived via mobile? Armed with this information, you would likely change all of your Adwords device targeting to mobile devices. You might also want to partner with more mobile ad networks to create mobile specific campaigns.

2. Optimize your website for your best customers

Although user experience and front end designers strive to make websites work everywhere, it can also be effective to optimize for specific device- and browser-specific experiences. For example, how does browsing through product categories look on a mobile device? To start, you can use responsive design to resize your website across devices. After looking at the data and seeing that pain points aren’t the same across devices and browsers, you might decide the mobile experience needs to be completely different than what you have currently.

3. Target specific types of users with better marketing campaigns

Once you know how and where your best customers choose to interact with your site, you have the opportunity to surprise those customers with innovative campaigns. Take all of that data you are collecting and feel confident your creative decisions are moving in the right direction. If your best customers turn out to be people who are checking Facebook during their commute home, how can you capture their attention? The great part about becoming a data-driven organization is you can start to test interesting campaigns and get  quick feedback on what works. You’ll want to take advantage of that!

How would you use User-Agent data to improve your analysis? We help our customers making use of this type of analysis every day. One of the most interesting stories we’ve come across is a customer who realized that iPad users had more than a 2x conversion rate site-wide.

We’d be happy to talk you through the implications of this type of analysis on your business—just get in touch with one of our analysts!