Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

We here at Hall use the ‘what if you were hit by a bus’ analogy all the time. The less morbid point we are trying to make is ensuring that anything you start, anything you touch and any project you are working on should be able to be picked up if for some reason you cannot be there (like if you got hit by a bus).

This work principle made it very unnerving for me when Google+ rolled out business pages and there could only be one administrator – yikes! What if I got hit by a bus?!? Who would pick up the task of managing our Google+ profile?!

Recently Google+ fixed this and now you can have page Owners and page Managers – phew! Each page can now only have one owner but it can have up to 50 managers (you can only invite 20 managers per day). Page owners and page managers have all of the same admin rights except page managers can NOT delete the page or transfer the ownership of the page.

To add a new manager to your Google+ page:

• Log in to Google+ and your business Google+ page
• Click on Settings (upper right hand side)
• Click on Managers (left hand side)
• Invite someone to be a manger of your page by adding their email address

You do not need to invite them with their Google+ email address. The invited party can accept with the email address you sent it to and then sign up to be a page manager with a different email address. When the person invited accepts to manage the page, the owner of the page will be notified via email.

Now, under the Managers section of your page, you will see the owner and any managers or invited managers. If an invitation is not accepted or if you want to cancel the invitation you can click on the X next to their email address. All managers can see the list of managers

To remove a manager, you can click the X by their name. When they are removed as a manager the page owner and the removed manager will receive an email.

We always recommend having more than one administrator to any business social network presence – you know, in case you get hit by a bus.

Photo credit: PoloGoomba

Amanda just wrote about how to find out what your IP address; but how do you go about excluding your traffic from your Google Analytics reports? With the old version of GA I knew how to input my IP address so it would get filtered in the reports;  but for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this in the new version. Thanks to a colleague,  she pointed it out to me and I thought I’d “pay it forward” and show you!

Click on any of the images below for a closer view.

1. After you’re logged into your Google Analytics account and have selected your account, in the upper right hand corner, you’ll see an “Admin” tab (See the image to the right). This will take you to the settings for that GA account; this is also where you can set up assets like Custom Alerts, Goals, and Users.
   
2. You want to make sure that you’re looking at the “Profiles” which is the top tab in this section, then select Filters. This is where you can add, remove, and edit filters on your Google Analytics account. If you’re setting up filters for the first time, choose “+ New Filter.” Indicate whether you are creating a new filter for a profile or applying an existing filter to a profile.
3. The next steps are very easy – give your filter a name (you might want to filter home traffic and office traffic; this is a good place to note which is which), select filter type (it’s probably predefined), and then choose “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” from the drop downs. This is where you put in your IP address! Click “Save” and voilà you have just filtered out your IP traffic from Google Analytics reports!

Pro tip!

Once you’ve filtered your traffic you should make an Annotation in Google Analytics. That way, if someone else is looking at your site metrics and they notice that traffic has dropped some in the last month, they can see that there is an annotation that reads, “Filtered out office IP traffic from reports” and be able to attribute that decline more easily. I try to get in the habit of making annotations whenever something significant may have changed on the site or that may affect the reports.

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!