WooCommerce London October 2015 Recap
What an adventurous meetup this was for the WooCommerce London group! The morning of the event we still didn’t know where we were going to host it, as the place we were supposed to be meeting sent an email Sunday midday (day before) that we’d be conflicting with another event there. Luckily, Elliot found this amazing space near Picadilly Circus that was available on very short notice. After a few emails and a bit of document signing, we were confirmed.
London @WooCommerce meetup getting ready! We're just by costa coffee not far from Piccadilly pic.twitter.com/vLcHOn6uHA
— Elliot (Raison) (@raisononline) October 26, 2015
Shout out to SiteGround for making our WooCommerce meetup possible by helping us with the finances to secure the place.
Thanks to @SiteGround for sponsoring the @WooCommerce London meetup tonight #woocommldn ❤️
— Marina Pape (@marinapape) October 26, 2015
Performance Marketing
Nejc Skoberne, from Cone Headed Cat and TransferWise, was our speaker for the night. His topic was a sort of reply to Marina’s talk a few months ago about branding and marketing. The main point of performance marketing is that every decision is underpinned by numbers.
It has begun! @nskoberne from @coneheadedcat is telling us about performance marketing. #woocommldn pic.twitter.com/hBa8aKg2xI
— Gabor Javorszky (@javorszky) October 26, 2015
We learned about the effective use of SEO, PPC advertising, and using Affiliates. Many stories were shared, and Nejc told us briefly how TransferWise organises their content strategy. Constant communication with affiliates is an absolute must. There have been instances where certain companies stopped a campaign but forgot to tell affiliates who kept referring customers that were expecting a deal that hadn’t been on for a while. Getting an “oh, yeah, we forgot” is rather awkward for all parties involved.
When it comes to analytics, there are vanity metrics, and metrics you can actually use. Do not fall into the trap of measuring the wrong things, or being bogged down with unnecessary information.
Great talk from @nskoberne on performance marketing at #woocommldn this eve (and what fine taste in stickers he has) pic.twitter.com/Y6ZZbhhU1y
— Marina Pape (@marinapape) October 26, 2015
WooCommerce and performance marketing
The first question I had when listening to the talk is “All right, but how do I actually make this work on my ecommerce store?” Though the meetup talk didn’t touch on WooCommerce-specific functionality, there are a few places you can begin looking for information (note, we cannot vouch 100% for all these plugins, they are just offered here as a good jumping-off point).
I’ll start with Grow (not an affiliate link 🙂 ), which is a fantastic new analytics plugin for your ecommerce store. It will shed some light on what is actually happening when it comes to conversions, giving you a solid basis from which to make decisions regarding which channels to finance, and which ones to slowly wean off. It’s also worth mentioning that Grow was developed by Elliot and his team, so you can be pretty confident it works.
KISSMetrics analytics is a third party plugin that integrates with your WooCommerce store. It’s available from WooThemes here: http://www.woothemes.com/products/kiss-metrics/.
Segment.io integration plugin provides a way of sending analytics data to a whole load of places, and is also available from the WooThemes store.
For affiliates, there are several extensions you could potentially look at, with three of them being: Affiliates Pro, AffiliateWP and Ambassador affiliate program integration. If you’re on the other side of the transaction, and you’re selling someone else’s products on your site, you could look into Product Retailers.
For SEO, I only have experience with Yoast: Yoast SEO, and Yoast WooCommerce SEO. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could go with All In One SEO, which is probably amazing too, but in the past 4 years I’ve used Yoast SEO on every single site I’ve built. This includes my former agency life and work on client sites :).
For PPC analytics you might need to integrate with Google Analytics. WooThemes has published a blog post on how to do that titled “How to Use Enhanced eCommerce for Google Analytics“. It’s a good read, and if you love data, you’ll appreciate it.
There are a lot of ways to make this work, but the implementation really requires a lot of thought.
Resources
Nejc generously shared a number of blogs that offer more information on facets of performance marketing. This list has been shared on the WooCommerce London’s meetup group’s page, and are shared again here for posterity. Hope you find these useful:
- Affiliates: http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/
- SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- SEO: http://nenadseo.com/blog/
- SEO: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/
- PPC: http://searchengineland.com/
- PPC: http://www.ppchero.com/
- PPC: http://searchenginewatch.com/
- Paid Social/PPC: http://www.wordstream.com/blog
- Social: http://www.jonloomer.com/
