From Page Views to Conversions: Improving Products with Analytics

James Kemp:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo ProductChat. I’m James Kemp, I’m the core product manager at WooCommerce and today we’re going to be discussing data driven decisions using user analytics for product improvement. And to join us we’ve got Katie Keith from Bantu. Katie, do you want to introduce yourself?

Katie Keith:
Yep. Hey, I’m Katie, co founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins. So our special guest today is Derek Ashauer, founder of Conversion Bridge and also Sunshine Photocart. So Derek, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. And can you tell us a bit more about what you do and your products?

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah. So I am a WordPress developer. I’ve done this since 2007. Ish. I have Sunshine Photocart, which is an E commerce, a standalone E commerce plugin just for photographers though very niche specific. I’ve had that for I guess about 12, 13 years now. But about a year ago I created Conversion Bridge, which is a new plugin that lets you easily add analytics to your WordPress website, Google Analytics. But also right now I think I’m at 15 or 16 different analytics platforms. . There’s so many new alternative analytics platforms that are out there in addition to just the default Google Analytics. But it also, the main, the main thing that it does is it makes it really easy to set up conversion tracking into analytics platforms. And then the other thing that I’ve learned is a lot of people want it to work with ad platforms as well. So Google Ads, meta ads, TikTok, all those kind of things. So it makes it for the most part a one click setup for 55 different plugins right now. So whether it’s WooCommerce, EDD, Gravity Forms, WS form, all the form plugins, you know, Lifter, LMS, all those things, it can send all the conversion data and you can have it set up in less than a minute because that’s just a major headache. There’s a lot of people who will add Google Analytics and then stop there. If they even do that. They’ll, you know, do the copy and paste the tracking snippet and you Know the header and footer code, plugins and stuff and call it a day. But really you need to get good data, not just basic tracking data. When people are visiting your website and that is, you know, when a form gets submitted, when someone makes a purchase on your website, when someone signs up for an email newsletter on your site, you want to know when people are taking all these different actions on your site. And conversion bridge can make it really simple regardless of which plugins or analytics platforms or ad platforms that you’re using.

James Kemp:
That’s super cool. I know I was setting up sites previously prior to being in a product role. I installed a similar plugin but it was less of a bridge and more of a way to just activate pretty much Google or Facebook like tracking in some way. And there was definitely like, even then there was like a lack of solutions in the market that did that. So I think it’s really clever to be able to connect all of these different kinds of events that occur on a WordPress website. Whether that’s, you know, in from WordPress Core, from any other plugins like Lifter, you mentioned from WooCommerce as well, there’s tons of data that you could be sending and analyzing after the fact. So you have this like bridging functionality. Do you intend to expand on that at all and offer insights into the data that’s being collected or are you focusing purely on collecting and routing that.

Derek Ashauer:
Data to the right place at the moment? I mean there’s always plans for everything. You know, when you’re making a product, you have your, you know, one year, two year and five year plan. So, you know, being able to extract stuff. Now at the moment it is really focused on getting stuff into the analytics or ad platforms. The one of my main reasons for creating it was also having made sites for clients through my own small business, you know, agency. I always never know what to call it. If it’s a one man team, am I an agency. But doing that, it was, you know, you go to GiveWP and you need to get there their Google Analytics conversion tracking plugin. You go to Lifter LLMS, you know, or you go to every plugin and each one has their own version of their Google Analytics one and then you have this or maybe a third party made it, you know, for that one. So it’s okay now we got to get this plugin. Then we have to go then spend another $40 a year on this plugin to then just do tracking. And then you look at the file and it’s like 10 lines of code. But you know like, you know like the famous, you know, know where to hit the hammer, the plumber who knows where to hit the hammer type thing. But, but it was always frustrating to then have to buy. My goal was to make this so that have a deep integration with every single plugin that it works with so that agency owners like myself could always use the exact same plugin. So right now that was my core driver for what I was creating with Conversion Bridge was a solution for agency owners who either take over a client site that maybe was already using Lifter and they’re like, okay, well what do we need to do? Well, we just use Conversion Bridge for everything. We don’t care. We can put it on there no matter what site comes to you or whatever your site, your client site’s needs are. I can use the same plugin every single time again. Well, this site wants to use Plausible. They’re in the uk, they’re really focused on privacy. They want to use Plausible but they still want to track conversions. Well, there is no add on for give WP that does plausible conversion tracking. You’d have to custom code that. And so this is just a really. That was my main driver for doing that. And then once you get and then you can then use whatever analytics platform you’re using for that site to then, you know, look through the data and understand what, what’s going on with the site. But if you’re not tracking it, then there’s no point. And I think that’s a big, what I’ve learned is a big thing to get people to recognize is that you need to do conversion tracking, not just page view tracking, which is all you get when you just cut and paste the snippet from the analytics platform that they give you.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I love that because that’s been such a huge pain point for me at Barn too, that we don’t know where our conversions are coming from and we’ve never really had good data. And the old Google Analytics was all right. And then it got terrible with GA4 of course and everybody. That was years ago and people are still struggling ever since then. And when I have marketing team calls, I think I’m a nightmare for my team because they talk about things like page views and I’m like, I don’t care about that. I only care about conversions. And they’re like, what metrics should we look at? And I just keep saying I only want to know about conversions, which might be short sighted, but that’s my attitude. But Derek, you mentioned earlier about what data the data is matters rather than just getting some data. So what specific data do you think that WordPress products need that they may not be getting at the moment?

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, so I mean it’s obviously purchases is number one, like you explained. I’m with you as well. You know, when I open up my dashboard in EDD, the only thing I look at is my sales numbers. That’s ultimately in the end to me, the final thing that matters. So purchases is number one, but also depends on what are your other marketing things. Are you trying to build an email list and using that as. As a way to drive sales? You know, for example, there’s a free version of Sunshine Photocart. They have to type in their email address to then get access to it. They could go to dot org, but on my website you have to type in an email address to. To basically hit the link to dot org as a way to build emails. I want to see when people are doing that. So I know where I’m generating those email subscribes. Where did they come from? Do they come from like a paid ad? Did they come from search engines? Did they come from another link on another blog site, you know, a referral site? So I can see who’s really driving those free users. So that’s another. I think a lot of people miss the email subscribed form as one to really track because it’s a huge. It can be based on how you have things set up a huge way to get new customers because then they get into your email funnel and or start using the plugin and within the free version of your plugin then you can track those metrics as well as you know how many people are clicking a link from within the plugin. And that’s another thing is track those links, add those UTM codes to all your links within your plugin so that you can then tell where they’re seeing that. Even if like on mine I have it there’s a, you know, a common header on all the settings pages and there’s get support or upgrade all those kind of things. Those have a unique UTM code compared to within like the settings of the plugin. Like this feature is unavailable right now. So I know exactly where they’re coming from and what link they’re actually clicking and to know where within my plugin they finally make that decision. You know what, that’s interesting. Let me see. I actually want to finally learn more. So I mean there’s all kinds of places that you can add those tracking areas to track with you.

James Kemp:
I assume you use Conversion Bridge yourself then on. On the Conversion Bridge website. Right. What does your stack look like then in terms of what are you tracking? Like what tools are using and what are you tracking and then what are you tracking it into? Because as Katie says, like the Google Analytics platform is very lacking in the data it gives you particularly around you know where those visitors are coming from. And there is. It does require a lot of UTM style code, but you don’t have any kind of understanding of like the Google search terms and things that they come in from and there’s a big gap. So I’m wondering if you found a solution that helps to combat that in some way.

Derek Ashauer:
Unfortunately not. The best combination is doing a combination of. Is adding Google Search Console. Even the alternative analytics platforms do that as well. That’s the main way to do that. And it’s because of how, because of new EU laws and the privacy stuff that they just. It’s not a Google Analytics problem per se, it’s a modern problem. And there’s not a single analytics platform that’ll tell you this specific key that this person came from, this specific keyword. They just don’t pass that data or collect that data anymore for privacy reasons. And it’s just the world we live in now. And one, and it is a major challenge of attribution these days. So Walt, you made the comment that Google Analytics is lacking data and that it’s bad. I wouldn’t say that it’s bad because of data it’s lacking. I personally think it’s bad because the UI is completely horrendous and it’s impossible to extract meaningful data quickly and easily. Where modern the privacy ones plausible Fathom some of these more modern ones. Persh is another one that I really love. You can see everything on one single screen and get all that data that you used to be able to get out of UA Universal Analytics. It kind of is a throwback to that and so it’s easier to digest. So that’s the reason why I like alternative ones. But there really isn’t a workaround. It really is just combining different things these days to kind of stitch together where things are coming from. And it is at some times you kind of have to just say I think this is what it is. It’s just you can’t be 100% attribution these days. It’s the nature of the beast these days. We got kind of spoiled in the olden days of being able to see the exact search terms that people saw and stuff like that.

James Kemp:
It was very different. Even like five to ten years ago, you had so much data. It’s interesting that it’s like a privacy issue because typically like the data that you get is not identifiable anyway. You cannot, you can track a user and their journey through your website, but you don’t know who that user is.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, it’s still something. It’s, you know, it’s one of those things that’s as clear as mud of what isn’t allowed and all this kind of stuff with the laws and even to some of myself who’ve been reading and researching this and trying to better understand this for a while now, it’s still not certain it really is who you talk to as to. And their willingness to be like, that’s fine. I don’t, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just everyone what everyone’s comfort level of what they’re willing to do.

James Kemp:
Yeah. To clarify, I don’t believe Google Analytics is inherently bad. Like you say, I think it collects tons of data and like you say, I think the struggle is knowing how to find that data within particularly the latest iteration of Google Analytics. But if you can figure that out, there’s a ton of data in there.

Katie Keith:
I would challenge that. I think it is inherently bad because we’ve been comparing for over a year running GA4 and Matamo side by side and looking at what percentage of our sales and revenue are being tracked by each platform. And Matamo is tracking several times more in terms of conversions. So GA4 is missing a lot of data. It might be something like more tools are blocking it because it’s known or something like that. But we do have evidence that Matamo is tracking significantly more. Still not what I would like, certainly not 100% like Derek said is now impossible. But GA4 is just missing stuff and so your data is worse.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Like you say, it’s probably related to ad blockers and tools like Brave, which is the browser I use, which just by default blocks all cookies and you know, scripts like that. Yeah, that’s definitely a struggle. Moving on from the actual tracking of data, have you put into practice any mechanisms to actually utilize that data in a way to improve your product in itself for you, your product is the thing that’s tracking the data. So that’s an interesting use case. But I mean, how could other product owners utilize data and not just like visitor data, but you know, event based data to improve their products? What’s worked for you? What have you found that works.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that I like is using Conversion Bridges, internal, what I call conversion journeys. So every time there’s a purchase, it’ll then show you the page by page. What they did a couple things, a couple things that I like to do is what, where. What was the first landing page that they hit? That’s really key to me. I noticed that with Conversion Bridge I have, I created a bunch of PSEO pages, programmatic SEO pages. So there’s one page for every, you know, like give WP to plausible, you know, has a page. There’s WooCommerce to Purch analytics, has its own page. So there’s like almost a thousand pages because of all the different combinations that Conversion Bridge sets up. So it’s nice to see what page that they hit. That tells me that my PSEO things are working really well that they came from this. I keep mentioning give because it is my give WP stuff is actually ranking really well. And so I get a lot of people who are trying to look, looking specifically for give WP conversion tracking. So that’s something that I’ve learned is that those pages have actually been effective and they’re worth investing more time in to continue either optimizing those landing pages so they have better content, more information to convert better. So that’s one great bit of information that I’ve got from that. Another thing I get is also that from the Conversion Journey is also what do they do after the purchase? Because it shows. It doesn’t just stop at purchase, it goes, what are they doing next? And I can notice that the first thing they do is they then go to the documentation of how to set up, you know, how to set this up and give WP and things like that. So knowing what the user does on their site is really helpful to know where it’s worth spending time and energy on. And knowing that either before purchase and even after purchase to make sure that they feel well supported and they have all the information they need so that they ultimately don’t have to contact me, that they just make the purchase, set it up and go on the merry way. Because everything worked. That’s my biggest thing. So, yeah, so that those are some.

James Kemp:
Can you track the exact. If they’re going to your documentation afterwards, can you track what they’re searching for?

Derek Ashauer:
I don’t like, like the search term that they type. I don’t actually even. I do not have that set up, actually. It’s just more of they went to this, they went to the gif WP of how to set it up. So that’s just kind of how I know that’s where they landed. But that would be worth something or worth exploring that because Conversion Bridge does have. You can track searches as well.

James Kemp:
You could find content gaps at that point people have searched.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, we do that.

James Kemp:
Maybe it doesn’t exist. Yeah.

Katie Keith:
So we have SearchWP for our knowledge base documentation and it’s not integrated with our other analytics, but we do analyze things like failed searches and most common searches and make sure that we do have documentation for those searches and the terminology people are using. And search WP is quite good because you can do things like setting up synonyms for misspellings or like everybody types shortcode a shortcake. Probably seen that in support tickets in the past that people just can’t type short code for some reason.

Derek Ashauer:
IOS, it’s iOS, it’s also correct.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, so we’ve got shortcake. We’ll also correct to short code because our unfortunately we don’t sell cake. That would be more fun. But the other gap with analytics is about how people are using your product. So Derek, it sounds like you’re using marketing information to get insights about which features people are using, for example, the GiveWP side of things. But at the moment I’m going through a journey to start selling Shopify apps. And as part of learning about that, I’ve discovered that most Shopify apps are using tools like mixpanel to actually track the specific features of their products that people are using. So which people are using which settings on the settings page, for example, and they can then directly feed that in. And I’m thinking I’m not seeing this in WordPress, nobody’s doing this in WordPress. And apparently you can actually use Mixpanel with WordPress plugins, but nobody does. So I’m on the very beginning of the journey to thinking about whether I can get analytics on the actual usage of the product. Have you ever done anything like that, say for Sunshine Photocarts?

Derek Ashauer:
I haven’t and it’s tough because I just have a feeling like setting screens are hard because they’re just so settings screening. You know, it’s not like a marketing site where you’re selling something. It’s one of those things where you know, having a video would actually be better. So knowing that they were able to, you know, you want more fine grained information on what a user is doing in your settings, were they able to find something? At that point it’s more of like my wife who’s a UX designer, product designer and stuff like that would, would much rather sit behind someone and watch them use that as opposed to just knowing that they tapped a button. They want to know, you know, a little bit more. Just want to actually see video of that and hear that person talking at that level. That’s more of the UX level, I think than more broad analytics, but I haven’t done it. I think it’s definitely an interesting space to try and I’m surprised that WordPress plugins haven’t. I’m curious if it is more of, you know, like on a Shopify site. It’s. You’re on Shopify, so you’re in their realm, you’re in WordPress. This is my realm. You shouldn’t be putting anything on here to third party data and all this kind of stuff that I, you know, obviously you’d have to get an opt in like we have to do for a lot of things, stuff like that.

James Kemp:
We do track that kind of stuff. If you opt in. We have two types of information that we collect. One is more like event based and one is more like what settings do you have enabled or disabled, for example? And it’s hugely valuable and opting in is obviously a key component to that. And it’s the hardest thing to get people to do because people inherently, especially these days, don’t particularly like to share their data, which is understandable. But yeah, that, that kind of information at a product level is hugely valuable. Seeing what options people are using, what each people are using is valuable. And then also seeing like how they use via the event tracking is very useful as well and helps to optimize like specific flows within the product.

Derek Ashauer:
Right? Yeah, that telemetry data for sure. Yeah. I just saw that as something a little bit different to like what settings and things like that. I think anyone who has a plugin should absolutely be doing that. So you know, what are your most popular features? Things that are being enabled, things like that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, but we don’t, we’re. The smaller plugins just aren’t doing that really and very few are. So it’s interesting that we’re a bit behind I think in WordPress. WordPress.

James Kemp:
Well, I think there’s no official way to do it. Right. So everyone has to roll their own mechanism.

Derek Ashauer:
That was one of the things, you know, talking about expanding Conversion Bridge. I mean it didn’t seem like it was worthwhile doing it in the core plugin because I’m not trying to sell, to sell Conversion Bridge directly to. That’s not my Main target audience is other product owners, more agencies. But it was something that I had considered at one point was making something to release to other product owners as my way of giving back of something that could be a more standard telemetry tool that you could install something that was, you know, you install the companion plugin on your own site that where it receives it and then you have your little class that you could. Or something that could do that. I considered it, but I think it would be a hugely valuable to the community to have something like that because yeah, every product owner should absolutely know what every setting, every single thing. I mean, at the moment, you know, for me, Sunshine Photo Cut for example, has I think 22 add ons. And knowing which add ons are the most popular is immensely helpful because then I go, yeah, I’m not going to waste my time, you know, spending two weeks to upgrade this add on because there’s four people out there in the world that are using it, which I have a couple add ons that are like that. There’s four people, I think actually using one of them. So I just don’t really bother with it.

James Kemp:
I think it would be a good thing to do. You mentioned like installing a companion plugin which probably wouldn’t work for product people as such unless they were installing it on their own website.

Derek Ashauer:
That’s what I meant. Like a companion pun in where it receives the telemetry data and then could also display it to have like a dashboard to display it. That’s what I meant by that.

James Kemp:
Okay, yeah. So you install the companion plugin on your own site and then you have like a class package or something in your product. Yeah.

James Kemp:
With kind of bridging these platforms together? Because it’s very much, it’s quite a like Zapier style scenario, right where you’re. You’re taking the format of one incoming thing and sending it out to another thing. So I imagine there’s a lot of kind of data mapping and things like that going on inside the core plugin or do you send it back to your own servers and.

Derek Ashauer:
No, everything stays within local. It’s. There’s nothing that goes to my servers to do anything at the moment. Eventually I’ll touch on that a little later for, for ad tracking there will need to be eventually. But yeah, there’s a, you know, a bit of data mapping. There’s you know, some platforms that have like Google Analytics or some of the, a couple of the ad platforms meta ads have very structured. If you have a purchase you need to structure the data in this way. So yeah, Conversion bridge basically sends. The biggest challenge is the plugins themselves because I want really deep integration with every plugin. So I’ll keep using GiveWP. You go into GiveWP within the GiveWP’s donation form settings is the Conversion bridge settings itself. So having to go into every single plugin who does their own admin settings differently and tying conversion bridges settings into those so that it feels very native, very natural. It’s right there to make it as easy and quickly as possible. It’s probably the biggest challenge because you have to learn every single plugin and how it works because nobody does admin settings in any way the same. But then ultimately I feel like I’ve cracked the code for the most part and been able to figure out how to make it work in you know, 98% of them really well and ways to make that so that the data comes in one certain way like you said is zapier. It all comes into some way and then when it’s getting ready to send a meta or Google Analytics or plausible it then knows how to reformat that because it knows what to expect and then properly formats that out for each ad or analytics platform how they need it. So yeah, it is like a little mini zapier inside and everything stays on your own site until obviously sends to the third party platforms.

James Kemp:
Have you found, has there been any like data point that you’ve noticed on your own site? You know, utilizing your product that’s led you to a decision that’s changed, you know, maybe how conversion rates are coming through, you know, helping people to convert more into utilizing your products or anything like that that you’ve just, you’ve got this data and then you’ve implemented something to improve it.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, I think what I mentioned before, still the best finding that I’ve had is that my PSEO pages are actually really good converters. That they’re doing what I hope that they would do. And what that tells me is that reaching and connecting with other plugin companies is a great way to continue to market and grow Conversion Bridge itself. Like I said, There’s 55 different plugins that it integrates with. So people are searching for GiveWP conversion tracking, Gravity Forms, WS form conversion tracking. They’re looking for that specific thing. So to communicate, to reach out to those other plugin companies, build materials, build videos around them so that it’s something that is. As someone, you know, for me who is a developer and I’m a sole developer trying to build a product, marketing doesn’t come natural. So any kind of data that gives me any ounce of confidence that the time spent in marketing is actually going to work is going to do something is huge for me because it’s one thing that I believe about developers. The one reason why we struggle with marketing is because we write some code, we can hit refresh, see if it worked instantly. We do something in marketing, we wait six months and did it work? I don’t know. Do we need to wait another three months? I have no idea. It’s such a different mentality that you have to do marketing versus development. So I often get stuck in this. I don’t do any marketing because I don’t know what to do because I’m not confident of what’s actually going to work. So the moment I have some data that proves that I saw this month three separate people landed on a GiveWP specific landing page and ended up buying. That tells me those landing pages are working and not just, you know, I could say you could if you just did basic tracking. Oh, I saw all these people landed on the Give WP page, but it wouldn’t tell me if they actually bought. If you just put that basic tracking code on your site so you could say you could have. I might have a thousand people who landed on the WS form, you know, equivalent page, and that might show me that, oh, wow, I need to really focus on WS form. But ultimately no one purchased, maybe because WS form already has some conversion tracking built in and so they ultimately chose not to buy my version of it. But if I didn’t have actual conversion tracking, I wouldn’t know just based on the amount of page views. That’s why conversion tracking is so important. Page views are just the start of things. You know, you could say thousand people visited this blog post but nobody who visited it bought something as a result of it. It could have. They were just researching something and they got their answer on the blog post and then moved on. They didn’t actually care about your product. That’s where the conversion tracking data really helps. Me personally is just getting over that hump of where to spend that time in marketing. And I’ve identified that those partnerships and talking about those other plugins is the perfect place for me to do it because it’s also very technical stuff too. How do you do GIVEWP conversion tracking? I can make a video out of that. That’s really simple. It’s not like what blog post do I write and spend three hours writing a blog post and am I a good enough writer and optimal all that kind of stuff. It’s. That’s a little bit more loose and vague to me personally as opposed to, let me just contact, you know, Matt at GiveWP and see what we can do to work out and do a cross promotion or something like that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I really love that because as well as that being really great for tracking how people are using your product, that’s actually the marketing strategy that I find works best for selling your product in the first place. So I expect that you rank pretty well for some of these things like GiveWP conversion tracking because not many people are doing it. Everyone always says, oh, the WordPress market’s oversaturated, there’s no product ideas. Well, that’s so untrue because you’ve got all these little ideas that you can profit from and people are searching for. So I really like that actually you’re using that to inform the development of the product. But I bet that’s getting you a lot of sales. Whereas if you wrote a general article about, which you probably should, but if you wrote a blog post about how to set up conversion tracking for WooCommerce store or something, you’re not going to rank, are you? That’s really difficult.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, it’s going to be a lot more challenging for. Yeah. To compete on WooCommerce type terms. So that’s where I am noticing and probably one reason why I’m noticing that I’m getting more of a give WP conversion tracking versus a WooCommerce search because yeah, I’m rank, you know, first or second for those terms compared because everyone has a WooCommerce conversion tracking article of how to copy and paste that tracking code and how to do all the Code snippets to get all that to work and all this kind of stuff where conversion bridge does just make it a one click process. But.

James Kemp:
But you could go even more long tail on those search terms for.

Derek Ashauer:
Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the ultimate goal with it. But as someone who’s starting their product, it’s only a year old, let’s go for the even lower hanging. The easier stuff. That’s where I’m getting sales is people who are working with these other maybe smaller plugins. And me as a one man team, I don’t need a thousand sales a day to support a team. I only need one sale a day to support myself. That’s really all I need. So. So getting those types of people is a perfectly valid way for me to market and grow my own plugin for sure.

James Kemp:
I. With you, with these SEO pages that you mentioned, I’m assuming the P stands for programmatic, right? So are these like automated or are you physically writing each one?

Derek Ashauer:
No, there, there’s a template. Basically I think the best description I heard is a Mad Lib style page. I have, you know I use like ACF to customize like this plugin. Like for example WS form can do registrations, it can kind of tag what each plugin integration can do and what analytics and then if what kind of data the analytics platforms can accept. Because not all of them, except for like not all of them accept revenue data or things like that. And then based on that it’s just like a bunch of if statements. If it has this, this analytics platform can do this and this form can do this, include this sentence and stuff like that. So and they work. And then of course custom meta titles and H1 tags for everything. And eventually you know, I’m trying to do videos so that you know, I’ll do a video of just like give WP how to set up give WP and then I’ll do like maybe a video of what does a conversion in plausible look like and then put the both of those videos on the page even though they’re not one whole video that is specifically GiveWP to plausible. Because like I said at this point now I think there’s probably, I think I’m almost up to about a thousand combinations with conversion vision between 55 plugins, 16 analytics platforms and six ad platforms. There’s no way I’m making a video for every single one of those combinations.

James Kemp:
It’s exponential. Really?

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it was great. I love that I added two new ad platforms on my latest release. And all of a sudden because of that, I got 110 new pages with 55 plugins. So, you know, 100 new content pages on my site instantly. And it took me about 30 seconds to add those pages.

Katie Keith:
Impressive. Yeah. I’d like to know more about the ad tracking side of things, because that’s an area that I’ve really struggled with, particularly with Facebook ads. The numbers that you get from Facebook are just clearly wrong. For example, we have a Facebook campaign for our All Access Pass and Facebook claims more conversions than we have sales on the All Access Pass. Pass. So do you have any advice on getting accurate ad tracking data?

Derek Ashauer:
I’ve never heard of. Had too many, honestly. It’s usually underreporting is usually the issue. Yeah. Ad tracking is one area that I actually think Conversion Bridge really helps Excel and increase accuracy. One of the ways it does it is with enhanced conversions. That’s Google Ads term for it. And I use the same term because Google Ads is 90% of what most people use. Every ad platform has their own version of that. But basically what it is, Enhanced conversions is the idea that when someone’s, for example, is on Facebook and they click on an ad and they go to your website, there’s a unique ID that Facebook sends over there. But you know, the Facebook pixel could be blocked because of ad blockers, all this kind of stuff, and you might lose that connection to that person ultimately making a purchase. That’s the main reason why we lose and usually have less conversions tracked than what are. What should actually be attributed to them. It’s really interesting that you have more than.

James Kemp:
You may have two pixels installed or something.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, I mean, maybe there’s. Yeah, there’s something along those lines. What Enhanced Conversions basically does is Facebook knows the email address of that person when they click that ad because they’re usually logged into Facebook when they do that. And then when the purchase is made, we can then pass their email address along to the conversion as part of the conversion event. Facebook then matches those two things. Goes well, we know, you know, derek@conversionbridgewp.com clicked on this ad and we also know that Derek@ Conversion Bridge WP Complete made this purchase as well. We can associate those and improve our attribution. So you get a good increase in attribution connection as a result of doing enhanced conversions and Conversion Bridge does. That was my. In my latest release, that was a big thing. I the. I think a couple versions ago I introduced enhanced conversions and it was about half the plugins just because of technical reasons, I found a way to make it work for every single plugin integration. Anytime an email address is collected, whether it’s like an email newsletter, subscribe form OR EDD or WooCommerce or you know, lifter analyst, anything that collects an email address is part of the conversion process. It can now send it to every, all six of the ad platforms that are currently supported. And of course I’m going to keep growing those ad platforms more and more. So it’s just a huge boost to your attribution that you can have on those. So yeah, that’s really important is attribution is a massive thing that is really important because that informs what you do with your ads. Because if you had, you have two ads that you’re running and you’re just not getting proper attribution, you don’t know which one’s actually performing and which one to then either keep using and the other one to kill and you know, get rid of because it’s not performing. So having really accurate attribution is important. And James, you talked about at the start of this of, you know, what search terms, it all goes back to that attribution, where did this person come from? And these are ways that were, that are really important to improve our odds and our data as much as possible in the world of privacy and all these kind of things. Of course your privacy policy needs to state you’re sending the email address to, to, to our, you know, ad platforms and things like that. But that’s just, just include that in your, in your privacy statement that people agree to during checkout or that you should have anyway, stuff like that.

James Kemp:
So yeah, it’s interesting. I think one of the biggest issues is we don’t need to know necessarily who the person is. We just want to know where they came from and you know, what led to the decision for them to purchase and then we can do more of that. But with privacy laws we lose a lot of that access. So yeah, I think attribution is hugely important.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah. And again, it just keeps going back to if you follow me on Twitter, it’s just I try and push that A lot of being like the basic code snippet is for unserious marketers is something that I posted the other day because you really need to get as much accurate data as possible and just page view and important conversions as we’ve talked about, conversion, tracking those enhanced conversions, all that accurate data to make informed decisions about what is working and what isn’t for you even on, on my site With Conversion Bridge I do. I am an affiliate for every and almost every integration that offers it. And I have like a Go link onto it and you know, make sure I project when I track every time someone clicks on one of those Go links. So I can see how many people are going back to the, to that, to that URL. Just there’s so many different things that you can track. You know, what button on the homepage do people click on? That is that goes to the Buy Now. I have like a Buy now on the header and I also have like a footer Buy now button on my homepage. I have one in the banner and I’m tracking all those different clicks as well. What clicks are they? You can do that. And Conversion Bridge lets you, you can also, you know, there’s integrations with the button block and all that kind of stuff. There’s integration with page builders as well for every single button on Page Builders that they, you know, that it integrates with. So you can track every little interaction down to button clicks as well. And it also has like a custom one. So any CSS selector you can come up with, you can write a custom, a line of a CSS selector and add a conversion when that gets clicked or when it gets viewed. You know, all kinds of things. There’s even scroll depth when this CSS selector comes into view. That can be considered a con that can be tracked as a custom event in your analytics platform. So you know, how many times did people scroll down to the footer and actually see that footer call to action could be something that you could do with Conversion Bridge as well.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think going back to what James said a minute ago about the privacy and you’re right, we don’t care about who’s doing it. We want to know what they did. But I think the problem that we can’t get over is if you’ve only got a small amount of data, like you only have one sale a day, you that is actually personally identifiable because you can cross reference it against your sales. And that’s where we could potentially trip up, which is so frustrating because I don’t care who they are. But in theory we could. And that means some things aren’t allowed. So I’m not sure what the solution to that is.

James Kemp:
Yeah, well, I wonder if them, I’m not saying this is the solution, but I wonder if them making a purchase is them also confirming in some way that they’re okay with you having their data.

Katie Keith:
Sometimes it tells you what website they were on. For example, before they went on your site, which may not have been a related website. So you could get some quite personal things that you shouldn’t do.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I don’t mean to do that automatically, but if they check the checkbox and said they’re okay with that, then that could be a way around it. But yeah, I do think as well, though, that in some respect we do want to know about the person. Not necessarily like specifically about the person, but, you know, gender or age. And that kind of stuff can be useful in terms of your marketing and like, who you’re marketing to. So there is. I think there is cases for wanting to know who that person is, but I think inherently most people initially just want to know, like, I think primarily like, what search term did people use to find the product or where did this person come from before they got on my site?

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and the landing page is really helpful too, like whether it was a blog post or something.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. Derek, I wonder if you mentioned being an affiliate for all of these different platforms. I could see how that would work for the actual analytics platforms. But have you noticed people coming to your site and then installing the product side of the equation? Like, does someone come to your site looking for, you know, WooCommerce tracking information and then go on to install WooCommerce or GiftWP?

Derek Ashauer:
I mean, I would have no way to know that. All I would know is that someone clicked on the, you know, here’s. Learn more about WooCommerce and they clicked on that link on my site. That’s about, you know, what they did after that. I wouldn’t.

James Kemp:
If you’re an affiliate, you would though, right?

Derek Ashauer:
I mean, if they purchased something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t know who that person is that clicked that link though, again, because the privacy stuff, I don’t have like no address and then be able to tie that to the affiliate and the affiliate purchase wouldn’t give me that information either.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And I was interested if people were coming to your site and this is kind of unrelated to the topic, but coming to your site and actually purchasing these products.

Derek Ashauer:
I have not received a single email in a year saying, here’s your affiliate payout from any of them. So I find it highly doubtful. I’m here. I only take me another two minutes to sign up for an affiliate and add the link. So let me try it and see if it does anything. But I don’t thank a single person because people are coming to the site because they’re already using that product and looking to Add something on top of it. So I’m not in any way surprised that hasn’t I could see maybe someone was like got the free version of maybe, you know, that other plugin. And then because they go, okay, well I. Because I can do conversion tracking and putting all the pieces together. Okay, now I’m ready to invest and dive in. And maybe somehow because they clicked that link, I was the last, you know, if they follow the last click attribution model that I ended up getting the commission for it in some way. But I. But also with 55 plugins, not everyone does affiliates. But you know, maybe I’m signed up to 30 to 35 affiliate programs. I’m not exactly checking them every month either. So.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting though because I think you could potentially do you mentioned like having the checkboxes that you check for each product on what features they offer. And I think that could be like a comparison of, you know, this analytics platform does this.

Derek Ashauer:
Oh yep, I have that. I have comparison tables all throughout my site and it’s great. I created a custom short code so I can output it and I can, you know, if this article is about plausible for whatever reason, I can just emphasize make plausible the first column in the list. So that’s the one and all kinds of fancy stuff. Yeah, it’s been a great dynamic way to build mine. You know, I have custom short codes that are just how many analytics platforms are supported and it’s just a quick short code so that when I’m writing a blog post I use that short code so that that automatically updates when I add a new ad platform. So I added two new app ad platforms and laser release. And now all my blog posts and content marketing throughout my entire site are instantly updated with the new number of ad platforms that it supports, things like that.

James Kemp:
But it’s very cool. I like the dynamic approach.

Derek Ashauer:
But yeah, there is on Conversion Bridge WP there is a comparison table of all the different analytics platforms, how much they cost, you know, how many, you know, the pro different. Just various different things. What types of things do they do? You know, e commerce tracking, basically. Do they accept revenue data? Because some of them don’t. They just say yeah, you made a purchase, that’s as best as you can do. So there’s different pros and cons.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that does sound like a really good way for people to choose an analytics platform in the first place and then use it with Conversion Bridge. And you might be surprised how your affiliate commission grows over time. For example, I know Someone that has a company that integrates many platforms with WordPress in other ways, not conversions. And they make a lot of affiliate commission. And again, you would think that people had already chosen the platform they want to integrate with WordPress before, but actually apparently not because they make so much affiliate commission. So you might be surprised. We will see.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah, yeah. Touching back also on the. You mentioned the like you trying different analytics platforms and stuff like that. We could compare them. Many of them offer free trials or you know, you get a certain amount, you know, of page views per month or something like that. One great thing about Conversion Bridge, you can have all 16 analytics platforms running at the same time.

Katie Keith:
I would expect it to slow down your site because I know Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are terrible for performance.

Derek Ashauer:
They’re huge JavaScript files. A lot of the alternative analytics platforms are tiny JavaScript files. So. And they all run their event after the page loads. That’s how they trigger it. So it’s, you know, it’s just that initial tiny, you know, 17 KB JavaScript files type thing. And again it’s only temporary something you run for a week or so, week or two. Try them all out, compare the data against them. Great thing about Conversion Bridge. Say you did again. I’ll just keep using GiveWP. You set up your conversion tracking for your one donation form. That’s what I have to do. It’s sent. You don’t have to do separate cut and paste code snippets for every single platform. You just set it up. I want conversion tracking and Give WP done. It sends it to every single platform that you have enabled. There’s nothing more you need to do. And then once you’re done, you say, all right, just disable. We’ll leave just plausible. We’ll leave just purch, you know, whatever one that ultimately you choose and want to go forward with, you can just leave that one ultimately enabled. So it makes it really easy to try those. And then you could see and I’ve done this myself on Conversion Bridge, WP and a couple other sites, sunshinephotocart.com and stuff. And I have like five different platforms enabled on those on Conversion Bridge. I leave them on permanently so that I have data to use during my own videos and things like that. So it’s just. And it’s more for my own research and other stuff like that. So I don’t recommend doing that long term for everyone. I do it for my reasons, for my obvious, you know, research and other types of reasons. But yeah, you could run it for a couple of weeks, compare and see which one gives the best data for you and try their free trials for a week or two and and do that and use Conversion Bridge to have you that while you still use Google Analytics. So if you considering trying, you know, a privacy friendly one, you could do that temporarily and not have to do any extra work. Really. You just create your free trial account at a different site and click a toggle and off you go.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that’s good. I’ve not heard anything that makes it that easy before, so that’s very impressive.

Derek Ashauer:
Yeah.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Well thank you so much for coming on. I think that provided lots of really useful information for product owners because I know analytics is a real pain point for many companies. Where can people find you online to learn more?

Derek Ashauer:
You have Conversion bridge wp.com is the conversion bridge plugin. I have a few other small plugins@wpsunshine.com and then I am pretty active on Twitter, Derek AsAshauer or X.

Katie Keith:
Perfect. Well thank you so much and hopefully have you on again soon in future. And thanks James as well. Bye.

James Kemp:
Thanks all.

Derek Ashauer:
Thank you guys.