Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Each computer or device that communicates over the internet has a numerical label assigned to it – your IP address. This way your computer can be distinguished from everyone else. Think of it as your computer’s phone number.

You may need your IP address to set up a firewall, or sync a device or program to your computer. It is also handy to know so you can exclude your IP address from your Google Analytics results. By excluding your IP address you will block any data from your office network and get a more true picture of your website’s results.

There are lots of ways to figure out your IP address….

Jenika likes IP Chicken, but let’s be honest… she probably just likes the chicken.

Matt, on the other hand, likes the new Google feature where if you Google the phrase ‘IP address’, it will show your IP address above the search results.

Hope that helps! Got this question twice this week!

We talked a lot about mobile last year and we’re probably going to talk about it even more this year. Hopefully you’re all okay with that and hopefully you took our advice and reviewed the mobile visitors on your website and maybe even considered using a mobile site. Did you see what Google Analytics is doing with mobile analytics now? They are showing you the actual device that your site visitors used to browse your site.

Why does this matter?

There are so many devices that use different screen sizes and offer different browsing experiences. It’s a lot to keep up with! The more you understand about the types of devices people are using to visit your site, the better you can improve your mobile site to give them a good user experience. Of course there is always responsive design, which allows you to cater your website to all mobile and tablet devices. However, you may still want to give your mobile visitors a unique mobile experience when interacting with your business website. So, if you do have a mobile site, you can use the information in Google Analytics to customize their interaction. Not only will the device type help you understand how they are browsing but it also gives you some insight as to who is browsing. For example, if you have a higher number of Blackberry visits than iPhone visits, what can you learn about the people browsing your site?

Other cool mobile reporting

Not only can you see the device, you can see who their service providers are and “Mobile Input Selector” tells you if they are using a touchscreen, a click wheel, or another method to select information using their mobile device. You can also see top screen resolutions in a simple report format.

It can be intimidating to try to accommodate so many different resolutions and device types but, there are lots of tools to help you see how your website looks on different devices.

(I think) This is the third year in a row dubbed as “the year of mobile” so you should all be ready for this by now. I know I am interested to see what happens in the mobile world this year – how voice search changes mobile browsing and how that will affect mobile advertising.

I am always intrigued to learn new and creative ways that businesses/brands are using mobile marketing. Is it to nerdy to say that I’m excited to see what mobile will bring to us this year? Oh well, it’s true, bring it on 2012!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Ahh… Here it finally is! My favorite day of the entire year; Christmas Eve Day! It’s full of so much excitement and anticipation! This year I tried to stretch it out as long as possible. I think I started listening to Christmas music the first week of November! It seems Google got in the spirit this year too. Has anyone noticed any of the fun effects they have added to their search results over the past month?

• By far one of the most fun toys I’ve played with this season; brought to us by Gmail, you can send a call/video from Santa! I highly recommend checking this out!
• Type “let it snow” in Google’s search engine, watch the snow fall, and then scrape the snow using your mouse (only works in some browsers).
• I absolutely love Christmas lights and, apparently, so does Google; check out their holiday doodle. You click on it and it lights up and then plays a song!
• Try using Google’s search engine and type in words including “Christmas” and “Santa.” Google’s results page becomes decorated with a string of holiday lights.
• YouTube even got in the spirit by adding a snowflake button to some of the videos so, when you click it, it starts to snow inside the videos!

It’s been fun to see how Google has gotten into the spirit. It seems like it was contagious too; people searching for the words “let it snow” increased more this month than it ever has! It’s nice to see that Google is helping spread Christmas cheer! Now I’m off to do the same thing!

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday season!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

I am sure that somewhere in Santa’s workshop there is a Testing Committee that spends all day testing the toys to make sure they look good and work the way they are supposed to. Testing is an important part of creating toys; I know those elves want to make sure the kids are happy on Christmas morning and not crying over broken toys.

Testing is also an important part of the website business. You want to make sure your website looks good and works too! But what about your mobile site? We talked a lot about mobile this year and encouraged you to check out what your website looked like on a mobile device. Did you?

If you were on the Testing Committee for mobile sites this is what you would test:

1. How does it look? If it doesn’t fit within the tiny screen very well or different elements are overlapping each other, send it back to the work shop!
2. The speed. Recently graduated from Google Labs, Google offers Page Speed testing for mobile.  Simply put the URL into the form field, click “Analyze,” and  make sure the “Mobile” option is selected in the right hand corner. The overview will give you a score out of 100. Did you get an F? Are there any high priority items to fix?
3. Is it broke? At Hall, we like to test the validity of site code using the W3C code standards. Now there are W3C standards for mobile so we can check out the code using that tool.  Same as Google Page Speed you just need to put the URL into the form field and click “Check.” Again, you get a score kicked back out of 100%. How’d you do this time? Similar to the Page Speed Test, they try to prioritize the edits you need to make to your mobile site in order to have it comply with mobile standards. If you’re still seeing critical errors, you might need to send it back to the work shop.
4. How does it look on different devices? Does it look good on some devices and poorly in others? Depending on your industry you might want to ask other people you work with to test it on their devices and report back. If your industry requires more extensive, ongoing testing you can purchase different devices for testing or (probably a cheaper option) download a device emulator. We like MITE (Mobile Internet Testing Environment) a lot because it has a huge device library. Using MITE, you also get a grade based on Content, Performance, and W3C best practices; plus you get a visual of what your site looks like in a particular device. But there are also other device emulators that you can download  and even some good Firefox add ons that we have found helpful.

Your mobile site is more important now than it has ever been. By now you should have a clear idea of how much traffic your site is getting from mobile browsers and how that is growing over time as well as how to review your site’s performance. Don’t overlook testing your mobile site; just like the elves you want to make sure that it looks good and works properly for everyone that uses it.

Photo Credit: Elf Yourself by JibJab & Office Max

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!