We Made It to Austin and the 2016 WooCommerce Conference!
The opening WooCommerce Conference keynote with Matt Mullenweg was very interesting. Here are some key points and stats from his talk on the state of Woo and WordPress:
- 1 in 4 websites now run on WordPress
- Current growth stats of WooCommerce
- September 2011 – Zero downloads
- September 2012 – 310,000 downloads
- November 2013 – 2,000,000 downloads (WooCommerce 2.0)
- November 2014 – 5,000,000 downloads (WooCommerce 2.2), 350+ extensions, and 380,000 site installations. Team was 45 people deep
- Today: 13,800,000 downloads! Powered by 78 people over 18 countries
- WooCommerce is translated into 26 languages worldwide
- WooCommerce 2.6 will be dropping sometime in May 2016
How to Turn Data into Insights & Customers with Peep Laja from ConversionXL
Optimizaiton is compound interest for growth- How would you go about growth?
- #1 you need a systematic approach, a process
- Best practices are more like common practices; they are where you start, not end.
- Did you know that the Amazon Prime average conversion rate is 75%!
- Copying the layout and approach of big successful businesses and competitors is not going to help at all. They don’t know what they are doing either.
- What are the things that matter most to your buyers? More than half the copy on your website is doing nothing and probably hurting your sales, YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT MATTERS TO YOUR BUYERS!
- This is accomplished through testing and research
- Ask the right questions…
- #1 you need a systematic approach, a process
- 6 Key Steps to the Process
- Technical Analysis
- Heuristic Analysis
- Digital Analytics (heap analytics, need to look into this)
- Mouse Tracking (session replays, how can we get this?)
- Qualitative Surveys (send to people who purchase with incentives, with simple open-ended questions, no multiple choices, need to learn more about who is buying to find more of them)
- User Testing
- Conversion Optimization is NEVER done!
Make Facebook Ads Work for You
- Facebook tracks with User ID and NOT cookies. This makes multi-device tracking possible, which is vastly superior to more traditional paid search advertising.
- MOBILE FIRST! Don’t think ads, think engagement, organic boost, talk to people like PEOPLE.
Lessons Learned from Selling (a crazy amount of) Lipstick & Scaling Cababilities of WooCommerce
- Your success with e-commerce is linked to your appetite for experimentation
- If you aren’t prepared to do this you will just be copying someone else
- Define the target right and defining the right target are two different things
- What’s the right metric for YOU?
- Add to carts per minute is a valuable metric…..Chris Lema and his team was able to run 2000 add to cart events per minute for their customer last Black Friday. WooCommerce can scale if done properly.
- Scaling WooCommerce takes more than just setting it up
- Hire developers who prefer testing over everything
- Your host should be a partner not just a vendor
- Everyone has blindspots. The solution is a great team
- If you end well, people will remember a positive. If you end bad, they won’t
That’s all from this morning. More to come later from the afternoon session!
