WordPress e-Commerce Marketing Statistics
With so many marketing options on the internet, it’s important to track which is working. Even LinkedIn is running ads for us now, something we jumped on board after receiving a $100.00 voucher code to get started. So that’s Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Bing and a few others running ads for us and each ad is different too. So it is not enough to simply get a good click ratio per pound or dollar because each marketing service has a different type of audience. Take Facebook for example, highly social and covers a wide age range. Facebook users may be in the frame of mind to click on things out of boredome, rather than eager to buy what your advertising. Well that is my theory anyway, because I know a lot of Facebook users and know why they go on Facebook. Now consider Bing, I don’t know any young people who use it at all and some can’t even tell you what it is. Google and Yahoo are already on the tip of their tongues so why would they use yet another search engine. That leaves me to think that Bing users are older, workers in the office or just Microsoft fans and may be closer to my target audience, maybe. Lastly I want to mention LinkedIn, without a doubt any clicks from that network are worth getting but LinkedIn users may be the type of people that will click on anything new in terms of technology, out of pure interest. Is that a good or bad thing, I mean interest is one thing but it does not mean that person has business plans that require my software or services. I may be right, I may be wrong but we need to try hard to find out and apply our budget to the service that works.
Ask Customers
What we need to know is which clicks become sales, the conversion. The only real way to do this is either by tracking every visitor, recording the referer and storing that along information along with transaction through a shopping cart, or no transaction as the case could be. That option I turned down because it would mean a lot of customising to the premium e-commerce plugin we use for providing shopping cart functionality, eStore. Instead I opted to simply ask my customers, the downside there is that they may not always tell you accurate information i.e. the options available are in a menu and some may or may not select a random item in the menu. Here is a screenshot of the page I created yesterday for viewing statistics created by my customers. They are presenting with the marketing question on activating a file for downloading permission.
Incentives
You might agree with me, that incentive is everything and I believe in it strongly so I’ve begin adding a points system to my blog. Users will be awarded with points for everything they do, from commenting on my blog too answering marketing questions. Points can be spent on downloading items, that way we encourage those who visit often to do other things on our site rather than download the latest version of a file. I do issue some easy points to begin with, probably enough for the average person to last many months however I decided on this approach for a good reason. Some customers are downloading the files 3-4 times a week, sometimes days in a row even when no new versions are released. Obviously we need to be cautious in that situation as someone may be sharing their account and it really made me think that must be what is happening. However we track the IP address of our visitors and I was wrong, people simply downloaded the file daily to ensure they had the latest version without actually checking if I had released an update. So, whatever I charge for a software product it just isn’t going to be enough to cover a lifetime of unlimited downloading. That is something I’m only just learning as you can tell.
Need A Similiar System?
Most of what I have mentioned is built into a single plugin and it is intigrated with other plugins. Meaning that it would not work with your blog unless you were using eStore and Download Monitor. However I am available to customise it for your own blog with the fee depending on the plugins you are using and exactly what you would like done. By the end of 2011 I’m hoping to have small competitions builts into the system and automatically reward users for reaching milestones i.e. 100 blog comments. I even want to intigrate it with the phpBB forum so using the forum also generates rewards. I may not get the phpBB intigration done until during 2011 however as I have a new csv import plugin to create, that will take the rest of 2010.