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Measurements – Four Favorite WordPress Stat/Analytics Plugins for your Site’s Dashboard

July 12, 2010 by Marc Leave a Comment

One of the treats with a WordPress based website is how easy it is to measure results of your posts and other marketing activity. What gets measured gets done and the plugins discussed in this post can help.

Of course you can get all this from Google Analytics, and if your hosting company provides the server host logs, in programs like AWStats, Webalizer and Analog those too. But you have to login in to those services. I think it is great as long as your are in the Admin area of your WordPress based website to see how your site traffic is while you are right there … writing a post, approving comments or otherwise updating the site.

Below are four WordPress stat plugins that I like. Not sure which one I like better, they all provide a little bit different view of your site traffic and depth. They are all current (as of this post date) work well with WP 3.0 and fortunately they all seem compatible with one another.

WordPress.com Stats

If you have activated Akismet (and you should) you should also install and activate WordPress.com Stats. It uses the same API key that you use in Akismet. WordPress.com Stats provides an excellent data set for quick review with nice “drill-down” functionality. All the data is processed in WordPress’ servers so this plugin will not slow down your site or load your server. Very fast. Ultra easy to setup.

Analytics360

This plugin was developed by Alex King for MailChimp. (Alex is also the author of the indispensible Twitter Tools plugin.) Analytics360 allows you to pull your Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard for easy review TOGETHER with your MailChimp data. In one panel you can see how your posts and email are driving site traffic. Trends in site traffic and list growth. And your site’s top traffic sources.

This plugin does require Google Analytics (also free) and will work with or without MailChimp, but the basic MailChimp account is free and allows you a list of up to 500 addresses and 3000 sent emails per month. If you don’t already have Google Analytics tracking in your site, Google Analyticator is a very simple to use plugin that makes placing the Google Analytics script easy.

Clicky

I am liking Clicky more and more; it has very easy to read, useful interface and uses your real time site data. Joost de Valk (a true WordPress SEO master) created a new Clicky plugin to take advantage of the many new statistical features offered by Clicky. The basic Clicky stat account is free and provides some unique views of your website traffic. It is simple and quick to setup a Clicky account and then install and enable the Clicky plugin.

Woopra Analytics

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.” And I find that somehow the Woopra’s WordPress plugin stat reporting interface is fun to use (“fun” and “stats” don’t normally go together) and again provides some unique perspectives into your site visitors and traffic. Like all the other plugins listed here you will need an account for the data tracker, but the basic Woopra account is free and simple to setup. Just visit the Woopra website and sign up. Then place the script in your site’s footer, activate the plugin and you are good to go.

May you have great measurements! If you have any questions just email me. All four of the tools are running on this site.

Filed Under: Business Planning, Internet Marketing, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: Internet Marketing, search marketing, search optimization, statistics, trends, Websites

Wall Street Journal reveals average US wedding cost is really about $15K, or less!

November 15, 2008 by Marc 5 Comments

One of the dirty little secrets of the wedding press is that the oft-repeated statistic that the averge US per wedding spending is approaching $30,000 is really a lie.

Last May in a blog post titled “Lies, damned lies and statistics”, I pointed this out using recent figures from The Wedding Report. Using The Wedding Report’s own data I shared that over 80% of the weddings in their data set spent less than half the amount they reported as “average”.

Recently, Christina Fredrichsen of IntimateWeddings.com directed me to a Wall Street Journal article “Weddings Are Not The Budget Drains Some Surveys Suggest” which further exposed this problem and even interviewed some of our profession’s leaders who work to perpetuate the spending falsehood.

It is not that I am against lux weddings and upscale brides. The troublesome issue with the misleading wedding cost reports is that the reports are purposefully packaged to misrepresent and oversell wedding professionals and brides-to-be misinformation as to the cost of the typical wedding. This can cause many problems for both the brides-to-be and wedding professionals.

How many wedding professionals decide that their best business plan is to cater to the “upscale” bride? Weddings with budgets above 30K. And invest in expensive marketing to execute that business plan? And go out of business only to find that they were marketing to less than 5% of the market? And ignoring over 80% of the US weddings.

And think about the young couples feeling stressed because their budget seems so much less that what they read on The Knot or in Conde Nast. And possibly go into debt just for what they have been told is the “average” wedding?

In today’s new economic reality I feel that for most wedding professionals it would be much better to positionand market to serve the majority of the marketplace. What could be called the “Wedding Populaire” or even Volks-Wedding. The idea of the average wedding trying to reach an almost unaffordable level of extravagance is no longer stylish … or possible.

Filed Under: Advertising, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: marketing, spending, statistics, wedding cost

Today’s brides-to-be want your email

June 6, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

If you still think that email doesn’t work, please read this very recent article from eMarketer. It is an excellent summary of recent consumer direct marketing channel preference.

Some important information from the article:

“Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail. More than three-quarters said they had made such a purchase in response to direct mail. …

About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.”(emphasis added)

The article has more info and very useful tables showing preferences by age groups. Please take a short read of the full one pager.

What the surveys used in the article should reveal is that if you are not getting good results from your email marketing it is probably the result of the marketing message. Don’t settle for poor results.

With the cost of direct email being less than 10% the cost of direct mail while nearly as acceptable to the customer (and the fact that I also offer a unique quality targeted bride-to-be leadstream) one of my objectives is to help wedding professional clients refine their marketing message to reach today’s brides. I do that not only through this blog, but also a weekly ezine newsletter, frequent teleseminars, dedicated small online groups and individual review.

The marketing messages many of us have relied upon have seemingly lost much their effectiveness as our prospective Internet savvy bride-to-be clients have become more sophisticated. Thankfully it usually only takes a minor rethink and some simple changes to recapture marketing success. Direct marketing still works and direct email has the best return on investment.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: direct email, GenY, Millenial, statistics, trends, web

Insights to Facebook and MySpace friends and our upcoming May 28th teleseminar

May 26, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

Just a short post, part of getting ready for our free teleseminar regarding how wedding/bridal professionals can use MySpace and Facebook to increase their income.

Newsweek has a helpful article online by Steven Levy covering Facebook and MySpace friending, “How Many Friends Is Too Many?” The article provides excellent info contrasting the two social networks and how their prime users manage online friends in the virtual social network.

Our free teleseminar on how to use Facebook and MySpace to increase your business will be Wednesday May 28th, 8pm EDT, 7pm CDT, 6pm MDT, 5pm PDT. Mari Smith published Facebook business author, business development consultant and former wedding DJ will be featured guest speaker.

If you would like to participate in our teleseminar just send me an email I will reply with call in phone number and access code.

Filed Under: Leads, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: Facebook, GenY, Millenial, MySpace, Social Networks, statistics

Comparing three web marketing options on your profits

May 21, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

As a wedding professional you have three major channels for business development and marketing on the web, in addition to your website.

They are

Paid Search like Google Adwords,
Display Ads/Banners on placed on wedding directory websites or other sites either directly or with a service like AdSense
Direct Email.

All three are used to inform people of your goods and services, encourage them to visit your website to learn more and hopefully become your customer. Importantly for your business and profit decisions they also have different success rates and costs.

Fortunately on the internet there are ways and firms that measure the success rates of these different methods. Below is a table complied by Datran Media from DoubleClick, Morgan Stanley and WebSide Story for 2006-2007

Comparative marketing performance for Paid Search, Display Ads and Direct Email

Click-to-Conversion (sale) Rate:

Paid Search – 3.4%
Display Ads – <1%
Direct Email – 13.46%

So what does this mean? In short, display advertising is the worst, search is better and direct email is almost 4 times better than paid search. Out of 100 click throughs an average web marketer could expect over 13 new clients from direct email, over 3 new clients from search and fewer than 1 from a display ad.

Marc’s tip to wedding/bridal professionals:
To be blunt, unless your conversion rate to sales is very high, don’t buy display ads and do the math for paid search and direct email. From the measurements above you could spend 3 times as much for direct email as paid search and still, direct email would be the most profitable choice.

So explore what your Google Adwords are bidding at and what quality leads might cost then make an informed choice for the lowest cost and your highest potential profits.

For more assistance or questions just comment or send me an email.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: statistics, web

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics – Average Wedding Spending

May 17, 2008 by Marc 8 Comments

If Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, walks into a crowded bar … everyone in the bar is instantly a multimillionaire. On average, that is.

Most of us are aware of the constantly quoted and increasing average wedding cost number. I wonder how many of us really understand what the number means, I didn’t. But in trying to develop a new branding strategy for our current economy I thought I should really see what the average wedding was costing. To the left is a graph projecting per wedding spending over the next few years. The graph informs us that total projected per wedding spending for 2008 is $28,704. I think this is just simple mean average of total US wedding spending divided by the approximately 2.2 million weddings projected. But does the average wedding really cost anything close to $28,700? If you mean do half the wedding cost less and half cost more? No. In fact over 80% cost less!

To the left is another graph which divides the number of weddings into four spending ranges using the same data source. You can see that 50% of the weddings cost less than half the 28K+ “average”. And another 32% cost less than the average. Meaning that 4 out of 5 weddings will cost less than “average”. And only 18% of the weddings will spend more than the $28,704 average.

So why is this important? Because I was trying to find a way to position a wedding professional to appeal to brides with less money to spend than the “average” while retaining a desirable high quality and high value image. What I found is that the vast majority of brides have less money to spend than the average. They are already there! No wonder today’s bride seems difficult to communicate with. And when they do mention a budget they are almost timid. Much of our positioning and branding is overshooting about 80% of the market. I think we need to stop it.

Establishing an average so much higher than what the majority of brides have to spend is amplifying their fears, uncertainties and convincing them that their desires are unattainable. Are we helping to create some of the bridezillas? As an “industry” we have helped setup expectations that fewer than 20% of the brides can comfortably be part of. As wedding professionals we need knock that down. I think this issue is lowering our self esteem, and divorcing ourselves from reality and each other. Both brides and professionals. We need to show the typical bride she belongs, is valued and can expect high value, high quality service.

As a beginning, I suggest a way do this is to share with her what your typical client spends with you. Don’t quote your price, quote your client’s typical purchase. Don’t say what you think, share what your typical client thinks. Let your new prospect see you as a place where she can feel comfortable.

Filed Under: Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: Branding, statistics, wedding spending