Optimisation Report (July 2017) – Google Analysis

It’s been a couple of months since I wrote one of these reports. Time is really flying these days. I thought it would be useful to take stock yet again of the state of affairs with theme sales.

First up, the last time I wrote one of these reports was for the period May 2017.  Here’s how it looked in May.

What’s changed since then, well I’ve added Google Analytics to all of the demo websites to capture the sessions coming in to those direct. Here’s how the picture looks in July 2017.

This view is more representative about what’s been going on, you can see it’s almost the same as May from the second column onwards. However there’s more sessions now coming in at the first column. Rather than 65% of sessions having a product view, now only 22% have a product view.

The conversion rate therefore is lower, down at 0.63% (compared to previous figures around 2%). The number of transactions has been stable over the previous few months. Here’s a chart showing the Theme Sales through this website for the past year and a bit

The revenue has been steady, the above optimisation charts have been steady.

How to increase WordPress Theme Sales

It seems pretty clear from the above that improving the number of sessions (or users) through the funnel to a purchase is how you’d increase the revenues. It’s easier said than done.

What to look at first

The first thing I looked at was the product pages. I designed a page that is aimed to convert. This is in an attempt to address the number of people dropping off at the product page (i.e. 95% of people who viewed a product, didn’t add it to their cart).

I’m still looking at this and monitoring it. However, I’ve made some more subtle changes at the start of this month (August 2017) which I’ll report on in the next optimisation report in early September.

What’s next?

Aside from getting more sessions to move between columns, getting more sessions in the front door is another area which can blatantly help when it comes to selling themes. As I touched on in the July transparency report, if you look through the blog here there’s not a great deal of content which will bring in new customers.

Content, Content, Content

Looking at this blog, I’ve posted 14 posts in 2017. Of those, only two of them have been useful for customers looking to use a theme (e.g. how to clone product hunt, or 3 ways to use product hunt theme on your site).

The rest have been my own posts about optimising the website, or how to make money from themes. Great for attracting theme sellers, but end users, not so great.

It’s clear across all three blogs (this blog, the Epic Plugins Blog, and the Zero BS CRM blog) that content that is useful and related to the products is a way to get more traffic through content marketing.

Promote existing content

Did you know we have a full section of USEFUL theme guides? As well as blog posts on specific topics. The theme guides go into ways to use our themes in a way you might not have thought about.

I often write a post, then don’t do a great deal about promoting it. That’ll change now as I’ve started to plan both a content schedule as well as a promotion schedule of existing posts (and new ones which are in the pipeline).

I don’t expect this to give results overnight, but by the end of October I’m hoping to be able to report on the effectiveness of this approach to drive more customers into the funnel and more sales out of the website.