[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 390, entitled transforming conversion tracking in WordPress with conversion bridge.
It was published on Thursday, the 19th of September 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin.
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Okay, what have we got for you today?
Well, I'm talking today with Derek Ashauer from conversion bridge. And on the podcast today, you are going to learn all about the multitude of ways that this plugin will be able to help you track conversions on your WordPress website.
We go into how it simplifies multi-platform analytics and the ways that you can do that. How you can track marketing conversions.
We talk about WooCommerce. We talk about how you can selectively track different things.
We talk about GDPR, EU, privacy laws, Google analytics, and options outside of Google, analytics.
It really is a brand new product, and hopefully if you are trying to track anything on your WordPress website, particularly products, this will help.
I hope that you enjoy it.
I'm joined on the podcast today by Derek Ashauer. Hi Derek.
[00:05:35] Derek Ashauer: Hello. Thanks for having me.
[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. we're gonna talk today about a new-ish product that, Derek has launched. And if you're into tracking things, if you love data, then this might be really of interest to you.
It's called, Conversion Bridge and. It's URL is Conversion Bridge wp.com. So nice and straightforward to remember. Maybe go and check it out now. Pause the podcast, get near a computer Conversion Bridge wp.com, and then hit play. Then you'll have a much greater idea of what it is that we're talking about.
But before we get into it and what it does and how it works and why you built it, Derek, are you able to just give us a little bit of background, give us a quick bio about you and yourself and plugins and your history with WordPress.
[00:06:21] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, absolutely. I've been doing WordPress for, I think I narrowed it down to since 2007 or oh eight or something like that. So I've been building websites with it for a very, long time. I started out doing client sites, I, am mostly doing agency type work, the super freelancer.
Doing everything by myself for all my clients, all the design, development and coordination and all that entails. so yeah, so I've done that a very long time. I started another plugin, about 11 years ago called Sunshine Photo Cart. have another one called Confetti, and an address auto complete some other things to my other, my brand.
Other brand of plugins is WP Sunshine, which you can check [email protected]. so I've done some plugins as well for a little while, but I'm in my journey, as many plugin companies have started out, going from agency to trying to be product first. so I've been my goal for the last year or two, is doing that and Conversion Bridge is my latest thing to try and, make that happen to be a full-time product.
Developer and supporter and, and yeah. So that's, my journey there.
[00:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: All righty. That's great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for all that. so what is it? What does it do? What's its primary focus? Now, you can give us your elevator pitch, or you can go full on if you like. It's entirely up to you. But what does Conversion Bridge aim? what pain is it trying to remove? What's its purpose?
[00:07:51] Derek Ashauer: if, you know from, if you ever built a website for a client or even yourself, and you wanna get some data, getting that conversion tracking can actually be a pain in the butt with WordPress. trying to figure out where it goes, where, the code snippets need to go, how to hook it up with this plugin, things like that.
so basically what Conversion Bridge does is it solves the problem of. Turning conversion tracking into a one click thing. You install the plugin as usual. and then it's just enable conversion tracking toggle on. Done for pretty much every single integration. There's no code, there's nothing you need to figure out, and there's no double checking.
Is this on there? Does it do anything? You just know that, toggle it on and it's done. One of the main benefits of it is that it actually works with, I have it at 17 different platforms right now. I think it's 13 analytics platforms and for advertising platforms. This is the one reason why I created Conversion Bridge is 'cause I wanted to get away from Google Analytics for, I really disliked that forced update for everyone.
I understand why they did it, but I just really did not like it. I used to be able to send clients to Google Analytics, the old version, and say, here's your data. And they go, oh, great. That's easy. Never had to walk them through a single thing. And then all of a sudden we had GA four. And even someone like myself who's been building websites since 1999, I was struggling to find the data that I wanted.
So I wanted to move to one of the alternative platforms. I also didn't wanna use a cookie banner. No one loves those things. Everyone hates 'em. I was, yeah, I was redoing a web, one of my own websites, the Sunshine Photo Cartt website, and I was like, okay, let me reevaluate this thing as an American. You know what?
Let me learn better about these cookie, plugin or banners and do I really need one? And all this kind of stuff. And was like, analytics is one of the main reasons why people need to have a cookie banner is 'cause they're tracking people. let's use a different alternative. Let's use plausible fathom.
there's. There's many options these days, which are fantastic. And so it's oh, if I can switch, I don't need to use a cookie banner, great. But the downside was, is I still needed to con, track my conversions. So I still needed to know, when someone's purchasing, when someone signs, I wanna know when someone signed up for my newsletter, when they're contacting me for various things, just to get a feel for how well my marketing channels were going.
A lot of, WordPress plugins, they had Google Analytics add-ons, so we add conversion tracking for Google Analytics, but they, not a single one had anything for any of the alternative platforms. and I would say maybe even a third had one for just Google Analytics itself. So you still were responsible for cutting and pasting some code snippet, or just There was no documentation or no information whatsoever from the plugin on how to do it.
So you kinda left it, figure it out yourself. and so basically, I think this is. I solved this for myself and I think it's great for agencies, but anyone making their website 'cause it's takes a task that can be a major chore. Something that we don't really want to do. but we should be doing, we should be tracking where everyone's coming from and how we got our leads, our conversions, our purchases so we can have better marketing so we know what's actually working.
yeah, so it, it just makes something that's a major technical challenge for a lot of people who are used to, who aren't very familiar with code. There's a lot of people, which is, the WordPress space, who are WordPress builders, who, are great at, putting a great WordPress website together.
But maybe those technical things of code and things like that are a challenge. It's literally just. A couple clicks. I have a video on my site how to get, install your analytics and set up conversion tracking for all your plugins in less than one minute, and you're done. So it's, it takes this thing and just makes it a no-brainer to get it done.
[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like the approach that you've taken is to cover as many bases as you can right from the outset, really. So you mentioned that it connects to 17, I think 13 analytics platforms, plus four ad platforms. So it's pushing data from your website and we'll get into. The way it can push data in a minute, but some of these I'd actually never heard of.
there's the obvious ones You mentioned, the much maligned as you said, Google Analytics. I've heard of that one. fathom, definitely heard of that one. and a few more, but some that I hadn't heard of. plausible user Maven, ghost Square Perch, I dunno if I'm pronouncing that right.
tiny Analytics, sweat Tricks, and some more. You can go and check them out on, Conversion Bridge. wp.com/integrations, by the way. But, on the ad platform side, Google Ads, tick TikTok, interesting, Pinterest and Meta. So they're the 17 bases that you cover in that direction. So that's where all the data.
Ends up and what whatever you or your client have decided you want to use as the way of v visualizing that data and gathering it up over time, that's where it can be sent. So that pretty much, as far as I can see, covers all the bases. But then, if it was just a WordPress website. That would be one thing.
But the WordPress websites that we typically build for our clients are rammed top to bottom with plugins. And those plugins often have, different ways of doing things. They might, I don't know if it's like WooCommerce or something. There's definitely interest in tracking. How did people get here?
Who bought what, when did they back out? All of that kind of thing. If you've got some sort of LMS. Then you might wanna see who's, poking around in which corner of your, learning management course and so on and so forth. If you've got affiliates, you get the idea. And 51 at the moment, 51 WordPress plugins.
Bravo for that, by the way. that's a pretty neat achievement. And you've, it looks like you've taken the approach of let's just gather all the things that all the people are using on, generally speaking. they're all there, right? and figure out what they do and how we can get the analytics out the other end to the ad platform or what have you.
wow, that's a lot. Is there anything particular about the difference between the kind of things that they do? I mentioned WooCommerce, I mentioned an LMS system. Are there any other quirky ways of. Gathering data from the things that you've put in.
[00:14:25] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so even like in WooCommerce, For those who are using Google Analytics, or there are some, even other analytics platforms that are, getting to be just as good but easier to use. you can track everything from when a certain product is just viewed. when they add to cart, I.
They begin the checkout process, and then also when they ultimately purchase, you can understand the entire flow. So it can track each one of those. Like in Google Analytics, they now call 'em key events so you can, follow that funnel. and it will work with those specific, if you're, are, again, using Google Analytics, they have predefined events like begin checkout, add to cart, and all those kind of things.
And so it works with all of those perfectly so you can set up certain funnels. User Maven is a great one I like, because you can create your own custom funnels however you want. And so you can track all those, important events for things like, in that one or even easy digital downloads, it does it as well.
it's, when the form is viewed, when the form is submitted. it also makes sure that. When a form is properly submitted, one thing that a lot of people do is they'll put on the click of the submit button. that doesn't mean they submitted the form, it means they click the button.
There could have been errors that, something could have gone wrong with the form. It doesn't mean that it actually worked. so I, and I take that and I. and a lot of seriousness 'cause I wanna get real, true, accurate data as best as possible. so yeah, so it, it tries to cover every single thing that you would want to know for your marketing.
where, you know, so when people take an action that you would want them to know, signing up for a newsletter. There's a lot of websites that are trying to grow their newsletters these day with these days with Google going haywire. it's better to focus on doing, on building an email list.
So you wanna find where you are getting your newsletter subscribed. that's why it works with quite a few of the, like MailChimp for WordPress for example. it works with their, newsletter forms with mailer, with a few of the other newsletter, plugins that are out there in the WordPress space so that you can track when someone signs up for your, newsletter on your site.
[00:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: So again, dear listener, head to Conversion Bridge. wp.com/integrations. You'll see them all there. at the moment that we're recording, it's 51. I would imagine that number is, I dunno if Derek can nod at me. is it likely to go north? I'm
[00:17:03] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it
[00:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's gonna be
[00:17:05] Derek Ashauer: there's, several that are,
[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, at the bottom.
Actually, there's a, yeah, you've gotta coming soon. Section, which is got at least another what, 13 or so in there? Something like that.
[00:17:13] Derek Ashauer: working with some of those
plugin
[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: that was gonna be what I was, that was gonna be my next question actually, was, is that how this works? Do you know, do the, is it a symbiosis? Have some of these developers come to you and said, look, we've got this, I don't know, membership based plugin or something like that, and we get a lot of questions about how to connect analytics with it or whatever it may be.
We've, we see that you've got this, can you build our integration and do you work with them? Is that how some of this has happened?
[00:17:40] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, absolutely. There's been a handful, that have reached out to me as I've been, posting and talking about it on Twitter and they've seen it. so that's been great. I. Yeah. I've definitely had them reach out to me directly and, ask me to do those integrations, and I'm always happy to do and I put on the website everywhere, if there's integration that you want, please let me know.
There's a couple analytics platforms even I've never heard of that some people have recommended and, and usually I can get them at it fairly quickly. depends, on the plugin. Some of them, usually I, honestly was searching through and when I first started I just was like, alright, what are the big, the big ones, WooCommerce, the big forms and all that kind of stuff.
And then just sorted them by install count and was like, all right, what are the big, I'm building a new plugin and want to get as much reach as possible. started with the big, install counts and then just worked my way down. for the most part, I've gotten pretty good at being able to search the source code.
I got a pretty good process down of how to search it, find what I need, and then, and build the integration. And then if I'm struggling with something, look through the documentation and then if still can't find anything, then I reach out and. What's great about the WordPress plugin is, or WordPress community, is that when I reach out to them, a pretty much every single plugin company has been, yeah, sure, here's a lifetime, one site developer license.
Just take it, go for it. No problem. We're happy, to help you.
[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: To get into all their pro features as well and see what
[00:19:14] Derek Ashauer: yeah, exactly. But of course I'm just using 'em for my development local site, but it, to get access to it and, make sure I work with all of their features as best as possible.
[00:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: So that's the approach that you took is pick off the, big gum, like you said, and then kinda work your way down the list. that, that, makes perfect sense. in, so there must be some kind of weird surprises in there, the different kinds of things that you can track. obviously I.
WooCommerce, I think we can all imagine what the kind of tracking there might be. But yeah, you've got some things in here and I'm thinking, what would that even look like? So something like male poet or, I don't know. I dunno what's, I dunno what some of these ones are even. But presumably you've learned on the way, okay, this thing does this, we can track that strange thing.
[00:20:01] Derek Ashauer: like mail post those, it's mostly it's a, a news, I believe, if I recall, is, they're doing email marketing type stuff so you can subscribe for a newsletter. So yeah, you want to, you wanna know when someone subscribe, has that little enter email address, subscribe to my email newsletter and you wanna track that.
so yeah, that one's, stuff like that are pretty standard.
[00:20:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I just wondered if there was any quirky things out there that you could track from some of the integrations that you'd built, some kind of peculiar things that you thought, oh, that's that's interesting. I.
[00:20:38] Derek Ashauer: I would say, maybe, like some of the down the file download ones, it would, it, it might be a little bit of a stretch, but I could, I definitely could see some, Some needs, if you're building like a file, a whole bunch of files that you make available for download and you'd want to track those, maybe there's some important ones.
Maybe there's a white paper or something like that, that you'd want to, that you'd want to track when people are downloading that for free on your website.
[00:21:04] Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So if we're your customer. And we, purchased this from you and we'll talk about pricing and all of that, a little bit later. But what's the process then? I obviously, like you said, you install the plugin. we get that bit. How do we, do the connections?
How simple are you making this? And if, I switch on, say, oh, I don't know if, let's say Fathom, and then I switch on WooCommerce. Is there a lot of configuration that I need to go through to make those two things bind together and so that the WooCommerce stats get sent out to Fathom? Or have you made it as simple as possible?
Toggle this on ya, Don.
[00:21:43] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, my goal is to make it as absolutely as simple as possible, so it really is just a toggle. you there's all the different analytics platforms and you toggle on which one you're using. and then you enter, Google Analytics, fathom, they all have, a unique ID that associates that site that site profile or every single one has their little different name for it.
But you copy and paste that little unique Id, hit save and you're done. You've set up your analytics. It's now track, it's now added the core tracking code for that analytics platform. Switch to the integrations tab within. Conversion Bridge. And then you literally just click a toggle for which plugin.
It sorts them. It'll, identify which plugins you already have installed on your site, and it'll say, here are the ones that you have installed, and it'll list all the other ones below, just in case. So that always reminds you of what's possible. but then when you're ready to say, do WooCommerce, you just.
Check the little toggle next to WooCommerce and now it's tracking purchases. But you also have the options then, and every integration will be different, depending on what exactly it is. But, the WooCommerce one, then you have some additional just check boxes. That's do you want to track, the add to carts?
Do you want to track the begin checkout? Do you want to track when they view the cart? all these different. Parts of that funnel that are unique to an e-commerce platform. the form plugins are. A hair more, you check the toggle and then you have to go to the forms. 'cause those are done on a per form
[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, because you
[00:23:11] Derek Ashauer: maybe you don't wanna track, do conversion tracking on, maybe you have five forms on your website and there's only one that you really care about tracking conversions on. Maybe there's some that are, behind a login or, aren't really marketing or they're, special needs.
So it's on a per form basis. Then you just go edit your form and for every form there's just a quick little, it's still a toggle. Just add a toggle. but again, each form has its own unique way of doing it. Ws form does it with, they have actions, so you can choose an action.
So you add an a conversion action and stuff like that. I. And yeah, you're pretty much done. You can customize it. you can, in Google Analytics, they have predefined labels and how everything's predefined for what, how the data needs to get set. But in other alternative analytics platforms like Fathom, plausible, Persch, all those other great ones, you can customize what that says.
So there's like a conversion label. You can call it whatever you'd like, and that's how it will appear in your analytics platform.
[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: that's nice. So it is actually human readable. Yeah,
[00:24:15] Derek Ashauer: yeah,
exactly. So you can make it human readable, make it really easy. and so you can customize what that label says, in your analytics platform.
[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's neat. Okay. Yeah, go on. Sorry. You sound like you had more.
[00:24:27] Derek Ashauer: no, that, and that's pretty much it. And I have a video, on my site that's talks about how you can go, you have your analytics installed and your conversion tracking set up in less than one minute. And it could be. And what's also awesome is that you could, that's as many plugins as you have.
it's just still a toggle. It's just click, click there. I just enabled conversion tracking on five plugins. it's, not hard at all. And you can also enable, as many analytics platforms as you
[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
[00:24:57] Derek Ashauer: for testing. For testing, I have, I think I have 10 different analytics platforms, enabled at once.
'cause I'm checking to make sure that it works and sends into all, of those as I'm testing and it works just fine. so it's, a lot of them offer free trials or they have free tiers and it's great. You could enable 10 different analytics platforms at once and see which one works for you, if and, try them
[00:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, if you're in a scenario where you wanna move away from one to the other, you could have two overlapping for a couple of months or something like that
[00:25:31] Derek Ashauer: Yep. Exactly.
[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: figure out, okay, that's how the data looks over on this new one. And we're happy with that.
I. Let's switch the old one off and what have you, so you can, you could have all, 17, 17 of them going at the same, time if you so chose. how does, how does the, sort of modern, concern about data privacy and things like that, is there any things that you need to be mindful of if you are doing this kind of thing?
Is there anything that you had to build into the plugin to, I don't know, to EE expunge data in certain ways, or, I don't know.
[00:26:04] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, I know we're all still trying to understand, what does that mean? And me as an American, I'm not used to the EU privacy stuff as much, but, but yeah, I've definitely had to learn a lot of it. And like, I said, like most people, we're still trying to fully wrap our heads around what that means.
but yes, there are some, privacy things you gotta worry about if you're using Google Analytics. that's the biggest one. The great thing about. Every single one of the other analytics platforms that Conversion Bridge integrates with is that they're privacy focused, meaning you don't, they don't, take on anything that would be a concern for any privacy laws.
That's their main, one of their main benefits compared to Google Analytics. It's why this huge, massive. New industry is spawned off is because of all those privacy laws and the issues that, a lot of websites and site owners are having as a result of, oh shoot, Google Analytics, How do I get this set up to be, to work with EU privacy laws and all this kind of stuff, or new privacy, California and other, laws that are popping up around the world.
let's just ditch it. Let's just go use an alternate. I don't have to think about it, worry about it, and, and we can be good. So, yeah, it absolutely does. And in the latest one, latest release I just put out yesterday actually from recording this, it integrates with the cookie banners. so all the, so the cookie, like cookie bot cookie.
Yes. and a couple of the other, WordPress specific cookie banners and things like that. it'll follow and obey all those. like the Google Analytics integration will, and then there's, the Facebook TikTok. Pinch, like those ones that you're tracking things and sending data.
So if you have one of those, cookie banner plugins installed, it'll follow the rules of whatever the user has allowed. so yeah, so now it definitely, follows all those privacy rules as you, would need. And, you can configure it how you want. Do you want it to follow the, those cookie bots?
Yes. Okay. That's up to you. You decide,
[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: It it a personal level, is that one of the reasons why you moved away from Google Analytics? Did you want to know that you were in charge of your own data and that it was. just collecting the things that you needed and not, who knows what Google is doing with that data, frankly, but it's, very profitable.
I know that much.
[00:28:34] Derek Ashauer: On a personal level, I accept all on every single cookie banner because I don't care. I just want it to go away as fast as possible. And also, as a marketer, I don't mind if you know that where I came from and what I did on your website and why I converted or not. 'cause I would like to know that, so you should know that it personally doesn't bother me in any way.
for me, I just, I, again, when we started this conversation, I talked about how I, just didn't want to have a cookie banner on my website, so that's why I wanted to use. An alternative analytics platform. 'cause I just didn't wanna deal with it. I hate them so much.
[00:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:29:09] Derek Ashauer: anyone really likes them.
[00:29:10] Nathan Wrigley: are monstrosity. Some of them are, they're massive,
[00:29:13] Derek Ashauer: yeah, they are. Yeah.
[00:29:15] Nathan Wrigley: 10 minutes of choices.
[00:29:18] Derek Ashauer: It really is. As, I was doing those integrations, I was just like one that took up a third of the screen with gold, silver, bronze, and I'm like, I don't even know what this means. What does that mean to be gold, silver, bronze level privacy? That doesn't mean anything to me.
And yeah, it was just a beast of a, popup and, yeah.
[00:29:40] Nathan Wrigley: With, these, I'm gonna call them proprietary. No, I dunno what to call them. The, ones that are not Google Analytics, the ones that you might, I don't know, install on your own hardware or something like that. How, and again, this is nothing to do with your plugin necessarily, but obviously your plugin, combines with them and binds to them.
How, good are they these days? 'cause I, genuinely haven't played with any of these for, years and years. And back in the day they were they were beginning to be credible, but I'm guessing that at this point they're just as credible. But. I'll, let you take that.
[00:30:12] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, each one has their own unique pros and cons. there is some variety in there where Google Analytics is trying to solve a problem that anyone could use. And I'll say there, it's good for really high end marketers. It has a lot, it's been around for a very long time. They know what they're doing and for, people with multimillion dollar budgets.
Google Analytics is probably gonna, do that. Someone whose full-time job is just looking at Google Analytics data and doing reports is that, it's fine there, but we know that most site owners are not like that. If you're an agency making a site for your landscaping company. And you wanna give them the access to analytics, that's completely overwhelming.
Now, Google Analytics is completely overwhelming now, and what's great about all these alternatives, it's a throwback to what Universal Analytics used to be. something that's very simple to walk in one screen, you can see your top pages. What browses they're using, where they came from and all this kinda stuff.
And then with Conversion Bridge, what you know, how well your conversions are doing and where those, are coming from. So yeah, there's definitely some pros and cons. It depends on what you're doing. There's some that have. More tools to accept metadata on conversions. So what that means is they're better suited to handle e-commerce type websites.
So you can see what specific products or how much your purchases are. for example, yeah, I made, I, this one traffic source yielded me a hundred purchases, but the average price was $10 or this. Traffic source yielded me 20 purchases, but the average purchase price was a thousand dollars. things like that.
So you can tell, like in some analytics platforms, you can just say there's 20 purchases versus a hundred. That's all the data that they let me send into their platform. and other analytics platforms you can. Do more advanced data and get that more fine-grained information. And so there's some that are better than that.
And, and on the Conversion Bridge website, I have a comparison that talks through the pricing. if they have a Google Analytics, import process, all that kind of stuff. So it compares all these alternative analytics platforms. and, so you can see, what some pros and cons are between them, and then see which ones maybe you wanna give a try.
And like I said, with Conversion Bridge, you can run. Multiple at the exact same time. Check their data accuracy, see how accurate are they in tracking stuff on my site. and if there's any, Persh gave me a hundred visits, user may have even gave me 50. One of these isn't tracking all my visits, things like that.
[00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's, interesting. in terms of your existing customers, where does it, land? Do you find that your, plugin is useful for, I don't know, people who are inexperienced with building websites and they just want to point, click, don't have to code anything, don't have to figure out in WordPress where.
The, code snippet that I needed to install for this platform or that platform goes, or are you I don't know, working with agencies a bit. Are, agencies helping their own clients with your plugin? Maybe a bit of both. I.
[00:33:29] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, I'd say it's a little bit of both. I think it's, so far it's been, more educated users. the one reason because. Those people are the ones that recognize they need conversion tracking. Someone just starting a blog and just getting into websites hasn't quite learned what conversion tracking is that, they're just starting their little website.
They haven't gotten to the analytics and tracking and, understanding that kind of stuff. They're just, trying to get their site launched. So it is more people who are a little bit more educated know that they've needed to do conversion tracking, but haven't because they knew it was this.
It sounded annoying and frustrating, which, and it very much can be. and so they just never set it up and they're like, oh, this makes it easy. Great. And now I know I can just get it done real quick. But I would say the agencies and also companies that, I've been surprised by some, people who do maintenance care plans.
They wanna do it because, I learned, I'm not too. versed in maintenance plans and, the different, people who do maintenance, who have 500 clients that they do maintenance on. and that's all they do. And they have, really streamlined processes, but they apparently have different tiers.
So they have a, a. Gold, silver and bronze tier level of services. And a couple of customers came to me and was like, we would love to offer this to our gold tier customers as a value added benefit that we can set up conversion tracking for and everything. And that made it really easy for them to do that because when you're doing maintenance plans.
Who knows what plugins are gonna be installed on a site that's coming to you. So you know that when there's 50 integrations and 13 analytics platforms and all, all the different integrations that, are available with Conversion Bridge pretty much can handle any site that comes your way. regardless of what plugins or analytics platforms that customer happens to be using, you can then quickly add, this great value added benefit and get it set up, or an agency as we know, like you mentioned earlier.
In this as well, that who knows what plugins your client site's going to need to use. Maybe they need to WooCommerce, maybe they need to do Sure card on this one. Maybe they need to use Easy Digital downloads. We don't know, until we really dive in and, you know that you have the same plugin every single time that you can use to add the core tracking scripts and set up conversion tracking.
And so it's just, you don't get nickel and dimed, oh, I bought, I bought this one plugin. We're using this one plugin. They also then have an add-on for Google Analytics
Let me buy that now. Now I go for the next project. I got this plugin and they have then, some other random person has built a Google Analytics conversion tracking for it, and I need to go pay them something, So now you're all these levels deep of who you've been buying plugins from, or you just buy Conversion Bridge and you know you can use it on every single project.
[00:36:17] Nathan Wrigley: it does feel like the agency pitch is quite an interesting one because that, whole care plan, maintenance plan market, you can, there seems to be a, bit of upsell with, okay, we'll take care of your SEO, we'll do your, I don't know, we'll do your op plugin updates and what have you. We'll do, I don't know what, but this feels like something that could fit inside of that, like you said, on the gold plan.
We're gonna, enable conversion tracking and from the perspective of the agency owner. If you've got Conversion Bridge, you really are, you really are three minutes of work and you're done. and that's the thing, which is, on their website and giving them the data that they need. And so they see the value from it.
It's, value pricing, that's how it goes. So that seems like an interesting one, but also. Like you said, if you, if you are just beginning your journey, there's options as well. And if I'm looking at the pricing table at the moment, it's pretty straightforward pricing. You, basically, there, there's no like tiers.
You, you don't get certain features if you pay this and certain features, if you pay that. This is purely, I could be wrong about that of course, but it looks to me as if it's purely, you want more sites, it's gonna cost more. Is that how it works?
[00:37:27] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, there's no, I try, when I was trying to do pricing, it's a challenge to figure out how to do pricing for your product, but that's in the end what it came down to. So it's not like you, for, the bronze, you only get these obscure plugins and silver, you get some,
[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: for that. no, yeah,
[00:37:43] Derek Ashauer: yeah, exactly.
Then, and then gold, you finally get WooCommerce. It's, yeah, you get all 51 or, Plugin integrations that are right now, all the ad analytics, all the integrations at level, it's just purely number of sites. 'cause that was the main differentiator of what, what people have come to me talking about is saying, Hey, I had someone who was like, that's, they actually, I didn't even have that many right now.
I think I have a 200 site, license. And I, when I first started, I think I had it up to 25 and someone's oh, we have. 200 customers on our maintenance in our maintenance care system. And I was like, wait, what? I didn't even know that was a thing. So I was like, yeah, I guess I can bump, I can offer some really high si.
That's how I was kinda
[00:38:27] Nathan Wrigley: Somebody will come to you after this and say, I got a thousand, can we have a thousand? I'll see. So it's, really simple pricing. It jumps from one site for at this moment, caviar, mTOR. It's up to Derek, what he does with this pricing. But at this moment it's it's in the region of 50 bucks, $47, 40 for one site, and then it goes to 10 sites, 25, 30, sorry, 25, 50, a hundred, 200.
And obviously the price increases the more sites you want and you'd have to, manage that yourself. How are you doing support? It feels like this is a, it's you, I'm guessing. but are you, email support or you have some other system that you use?
[00:39:04] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, pretty standard email support. yeah, I've been doing support on my other plugins for 11 years, so I know I feel pretty good and confident that I know how to handle, how to do all that kind of stuff in a very good, efficient way. But, but yeah, I usually get back right away,
[00:39:21] Nathan Wrigley: And I can see at the bottom of your website we've got, the usual documentation page and things like that and what have you. So there's other ways of self-serving. If you, if you struggle, but there we go. So Conversion Bridge, wp.com. Go check it out. and if you want to get in touch with Derek, apart from the website and the contact form, is there any place you hang out and do more social stuff online?
Even a Twitter user or a Facebook user or LinkedIn, anything like that?
[00:39:51] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, unfortunately I'm a bit of a Twitter user, so I'm on there quite a bit. I enjoy being part of the WordPress community on there and talking with people and getting some good information from others as well. see, I can find me. Derek au on X Twitter.
[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: So it's just the spelling of your name basically. okay. I will,
[00:40:09] Derek Ashauer: And good luck with
[00:40:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll, yeah. I'm not gonna say it out loud, but, no, I amt actually. So it's at D-E-R-E-K-A-S-H-A-U-E-R. Now that'll get into the transcript as well, which is nice. okay. Conversion Bridge. it's a done deal.
Go check it out. to get it into the hundreds and hundreds of sites it probably deserves to get into. Thanks for chatting to me today, Derek. Really appreciate it.
[00:40:36] Derek Ashauer: Thank you so much, Nathan. I appreciate it as well.
[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting to Derek today about conversion bridge. If you've got anything you want to add please head over to WP Builds, and leave us a comment on the fabulous WordPress commenting system that we have over there.
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Okay, that really, really, really is it. I hope that you have a good week. I'm going to fade in some really dreadful, cheesy music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
