Talking data-driven product decisions on WP Product Talk
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I joined Zack Katz and Katie Keith on WP Product Talk to talk about making product decisions with real data instead of a hunch.
Most of the conversation was about the two kinds of data a plugin business runs on. There's usage data from your own product, which tells you what people actually do once they install it. And there's the analytics data your customers care about, which is the whole reason Conversion Bridge exists. I explained how I collect anonymous usage stats in a custom table with a hashed site ID, and what I've learned from looking at it.
We also got into how easy it is to read a number wrong. I look at the same question from a few different angles before I trust it, cross-check across analytics platforms, and then go talk to actual customers to see if the story holds up. Katie shared a great example where digging into her user data showed that 40% of them were nonprofits, which changed how she marketed the plugin.
The churn part was probably the most useful for me. People who set up analytics tracking and stopped there were the ones most likely to leave. They had numbers, but nothing telling them which numbers mattered. That pushed me toward more ad platform integrations and a lot more education around conversion tracking, not just page views.
