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.

• Ed Hewett
• 0 responses
•  mobile analytics

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