Trick Bag Browser Watch

May 2, 2012 – Besides being an all-around swell guy, Mitch Milam also has a great blog. As of May 2, his recent poll on which browser his readers expect to use with CRM 2011 had Chrome with 50%, IE with 49%, Firefox with 22% and Safari with 19% (you can vote more than once, so the percentages don’t add up to 100):

I thought it would be fun to compare that against a dashboard I created, the Trick Bag Browser Watch, which is based on the ClickDimensions custom entity, Page Visits. (I’ve written plenty about ClickDimensions, my favorite add-on for Dynamics CRM, so I won’t go into details here. For our present purposes, what you need to know is CD gives you a snippet of HTML/JavaScript, unique to your organization, and you drop it on any page or site you want to do analytics against. As you’ll see below, one of the big advantages of having records like visits and page views in your CRM is that they are tied back to contact records. And while anonymous analytics are interesting, non-anonymous analytics are a lot more interesting!)

With that background, let’s take a look at the revealed browser preferences of Dynamics CRM Trick Bag readers. The next figure shows two different visualizations of all site visits for the last six weeks. The one on the left is by week and browser in case we can see any trends; the one on the right is the all-up distribution for the period:

In my “poll”, you only get to vote once, so everything totals to 100%:

The main difference between Mitch’s results and mine is that about twice as many of my readers access the Trick Bag with IE than with Chrome; Mitch has a slight edge of readers forecasting they will use Chrome to access CRM 2011 when multi-browser support ships with the CRM Anywhere release sometime… very soon.

I mentioned above that analytics are more interesting when associated with something like contact records, which brings me to the next figure. These are the same two visualizations, but this filtered dataset only includes contact page views:

Here are the numbers:

IE accounts for 69% of visits from contacts as compared to its 51% share among all visits. That makes sense: you’d expect my contacts to be a pretty CRM-centric crowd, and CRM’s soon to be former IE-only requirement has created an IE bias in that group.

It will be fascinating to see how these numbers change in the next few months. For most of my clients, I expect the Big Deal
will be the availability, directly from Microsoft, of a rich mobile client for Dynamics CRM on the device of their choice. Microsoft has been clear and consistent on the importance of having a great mobile experience for Dynamics CRM, and I think we can expect that a fast-growing chunk of our CRM interaction will be mobile.

And to the extent that Trick Bag readers are representative of CRM users, I can expect a trend like the one shown here will continue (also from the Trick Bag Browser Watch dashboard):

I guess I better start optimizing those pages for the mobile experience!