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Recap: Google Tag Manager for Mobile


October 2, 2013

This is a recap post from the Google Analytics Summit 2013. Get the full details of the day on our Live Blog from Day 1 of the Summit and also don’t miss the Official Google Analytics Blog.


Hold onto your hats, folks.  Your mobile apps just got a lot more flexible!

Imagine rolling out new features in “stealth mode,” enabling select users to test them and provide feedback, before they’re officially public. Then when you’re ready, you just flip a switch, and the feature’s active for all the world.

That just happened; the GA team just formally released an update to the GA app for Android in about 10 seconds.  They didn’t have to wait for any approval process from the app store, and they didn’t need to recompile the app. The upgrade was seamless and (essentially) instantaneous. 

GTM for Mobile gives us some amazing capabilities to update app configuration on the fly. It opens new horizons for testing, optimization, reporting, and targeting the user experience.  Fortunately, the new GTM for mobile SDKs have tightly integrated Google Analytics, and likely other tracking/measurement technologies. Tuning your user experience based on your data is just clicks away; GTM can deploy tracking across your mobile apps without any code changes.

It’s a big change though: start thinking about your app less as a series of major release, but as a process of evolving configuration, guided by data. As the Google team put it, anything that you could hard-code in your app, you should set up as configuration. Stop using constants, make everything dynamic. Then push updated configuration via GTM.

Dynamic Data Driven Design Delivers. (™? Always Alliterate Any Assertion)