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Mobile Give and Go: How to Sprint Past the Competition
Late Saturday night the indoor soccer (association football) team I’m on played our best game of the season, and some of the top goal scoring sequences came from using variations of the give-and-go (or wall pass). For those unfamiliar with the technique, it involves the player with the ball passing (giving) the ball to a teammate (or wall) and then running into open space (going) to receive a pass.
The simple technique is one of the most effective passes in soccer because a player being closely guarded moves at speed into open space without having to dribble the ball through the defense. After penetrating the defense, the player then receives the ball back and often has a goal scoring opportunity. As I’ve mentioned before, wide open markets created by accelerating user adoption of mobile channels have created significant opportunities for businesses to beat their competition.
Businesses closely marked by competitors can leverage analytics and optimization just like the second offensive player in a give-and-go. While competitors can copy (guard) your current mobile initiatives, it’s very difficult to replicate business optimizations or anticipate the market opportunities such actions will create. By implementing data-driven optimizations, business can sprint past competitors into strategically open spaces.
By leveraging this rapid develop-iterate-innovate approach for mobile initiatives, businesses can take advantage of the expanding mobile market and create an environment favorable to innovation at the same time. Just as a pass to a player moving into open space creates more opportunities than a pass to a stationary player; focusing momentum of an organization that’s already moving can create opportunities not available from a standstill. As an example, one of Omniture’s early efforts in the mobile space was to provide tools for marketers on the move. To provide timely business insight, Omniture released a number of resources for monitoring effectiveness of online efforts. In addition to standard scheduled reports and alerts, these mobile tools enabled marketers to quickly assess the success of optimization efforts:
Mobile Optimized SiteCatalyst Dashboards
iPhone App [direct link to app in iTunes App Store]
BlackBerry App [direct link to app in Blackberry App World]
Android App [direct link to app in Android Market Place]
Mobile Site
Matt Langie touched on the customer value of timely access to analytics in this blog post a year ago. As you can see from the graphs below, these initiatives are bearing real fruit and exposing optimization opportunities. Omniture can now iterate on these initial efforts to accelerate success while adding significant value to customer analytic efforts.
In summary, using a mobile give-and-go strategy will get your business to the right place at the right time; because in today’s fast-evolving mobile ecosystem, if you’re standing still, you’ll probably get yanked to the ground by the hair.
How to exclude my internal traffic from reports?
If you want to exclude internal traffic from appearing in your reports, you can filter out a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses. You can also use cookies to filter out visits from particular users. We’ll explain how below.
To exclude by IP address:
- Click Filter Manager from the Analytics Settings page
- Enter a Filter Name for this filter
- From the Filter Type drop-down list, select Exclude all traffic from an IP address
- The IP address field will auto-populate with an example IP address. Enter the correct value. Remember to use regular expressions when entering any IP address. For example, if the IP address to filter is:
176.168.1.1
then the IP address value will be:
176\.168\.1\.1You may also enter a range of IP addresses. For example:
Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14
IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$For help finding the correct expression for your range of IP addresses, use our tool:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55572
- Select the profiles to which this filter should be applied in the Available Website Profiles box
- Click Add to move the selected profiles into the Selected Website Profiles list
- Click Finish to save this filter, or Cancel to return to the previous page
To exclude traffic by Cookie Content
Note: This is an advanced alternative to the previous method.
To exclude traffic from dynamic IP addresses, you can use a JavaScript function to set a cookie on your internal computers. You’ll then be able to filter all visitors with this cookies from appearing on your Analytics reports.
How to exclude traffic by cookie:
- Create a new page on your domain, containing the following code:
(Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website.)
- In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.
- Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No
How to manually track clicks on outbound links
Google Analytics provides an easy way to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because these links do not lead to a page on your site containing the UTM JavaScript, you will need to tag the link itself. This piece of JavaScript assigns a pageview to any click on a link – the pageview is attributed to the filename you specify.
For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com as a pageview for “/outgoing/example_com” you would add the following attribute to the link’s tag:
It is a good idea to log all of your outbound links into a logical directory structure as shown in the example. This way, you will be able to easily identify what pages visitors clicked on to leave your site.
To verify that _trackPageview is being called correctly, you can check your Top Content report 24-48 hours after the updated tracking code has been executed. You should be able to see the assigned pagename in your report.
