Making Data-Driven Product Decisions  🔗 **Source:** [Making Data-Driven Product Decisions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG5Ih0WzhPw) How much of your product strategy is based on evidence and how much is based on instinct? Every WordPress product owner has opinions about what drives growth. We all have ideas about which features matter most, where customers come from, what's worth spending time on. What if your analytics told a different story? If you've ever wondered whether you're solving the right problems or simply following your gut, this conversation's for you This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm Zach Katz with Gravity Kit. And I'm Katie Keith from Barn2. And before we get started, uh, I w- if you benefit from WP Product Talk, we'd love your support, and you can, uh, support the show by hitting subscribe right now. It only takes a second and makes a huge difference. Thank you. Yep. And huge thanks to Freemius for being our exclusive growth partner. Freemius helps software makers to grow, monetize, and succeed. They're a merchant of record platform, which means they handle everything around selling software, checkouts, payments, subscriptions, licensing and updates, global tax compliance, and that leaves you free to focus on building amazing data-driven products. Yeah. So, uh, speaking of data-driven products, Katie, we have a data-driven product, awesome expert person, uh, with, with Derek Ashauer. Derek, thank you for coming on the show. We're so pleased to, to have you. Uh, t- please tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. Uh, my name's Derek Ashauer. I've been making websites since probably 2002-ish. Um, shortly after s- joined WordPress. I think my official wp.org profile was 2005- Mm-hmm … which I made to submit my first free little utility plugin. Um I was doing client work, uh, on the side after getting my first web job out of college. Uh, and then like many of us then, you know, doing a little bit of freelance on the side, then, uh, got enough business to start working for myself, doing, you know, the glorified freelancer or independent agency, however you wanna call it. Um, during that time, I also, in 2013, uh, launched my first product, uh, um, called Sunshine Photo Cart, my first paid product, I guess I could say. Um, and that's a complete e-commerce plugin for WordPress for, specifically for photographers. So it's not built on WooCommerce. It was actually built before WooCommerce even existed. Um, I actually built some of the code based off Jigoshop, if you remember that. Um, so yeah, so that's, you know, has payment gateways, taxes, shipping, all, all those deals, all handled by myself as my very first product plugin, and I really do not recommend going to that scale, uh, on your first plugin. That was, you know, uh, it's a lot. Um, and then, uh, about four years ago, um, I went the complete opposite direction and started making some fun little plugins, um, based on client ideas. So one of those was a confetti plugin, so shoots a fun little confetti effect on the screen whenever people do things like submit forms, make purchases, sign up for a membership, stuff like that. And then another one was an address autocomplete anything, so allows you to add Google address autocomplete to any form on your WordPress website. Um, so it's not specific to one plugin integration, but you can any form, any form plugin that you want to work with, um, although it does have some plugin integrations. Um, and then a couple years ago, I got, I woke up one day and was to change a logo on a client site and was filled with complete dread over something that would take me 30 seconds I did the thing. I turned to my wife and said, "I can't do this anymore." "What needs to change?" S- so she was very kind and said, you know, "What needs to change? What do you need to do?" So I said, "I, I think I really wanna focus on my pro-" She goes, "Okay. What do we gotta do to make that happen?" Couple years ago, I decided to become product first, or start the journey to being product first, meaning that I spend most of my time doing products, and then the goal being that most of my income, if not all my income, comes from those products. Where right now… Yeah, so that was the goal about a couple years ago, and then thanks to the guys on my mastermind group, they encouraged me, uh, highly encouraged me to build what, uh, is my primary product now, called Conversion Bridge, which is, uh, allows you to add, um, 20 different analytics ad platforms. Over 20, I think I'm at 21 now. And now to nine ad platforms, and track conversions from over 65 different plugins. Um, so it's something that you can install on every single client site that you can imagine, regardless of what plugins or analytics platforms they're using. Get those analytics, track those conversions, which are the most important things on, um, pretty much every site, and do it within a couple minutes without ever touching a line of code, and most importantly, never having to look at Google Tag Manager again. Yeah. And we- Um, so yeah. So that's kind of my, uh, my journey and where I'm at. Yeah. And thanks again for coming on. Uh, for those who are watching live on YouTube, uh, please, uh, leave comments, questions, feedback, uh, and we will ask Derek, uh, your questions live. Um, we at Gravity kit use Conversion Bridge. Uh, we recently relaunched our site last year, and part of the problem with our previous website was that we didn't trust the data that was coming in. And so we found that, that we were making decisions with imperfect data. So now that we're basing all of our data, we've unified everything around Conversion Bridge, and that's really helped us feel more confident in what we're doing and why we're doing it. So that's really a great lead in into the conversation today, which is, uh, making decisions based on actual data. W- what does that, what does that mean? What, uh, what data should we be tracking? Uh, yeah, I mean, there's, I mean, I got a whole list of data you could be tracking that ranges from the obvious, benefit your analytics platform, what people come to your website, you know, what browser are they using, what pages are they visiting. You know, the classic analytics data that we've been used to for 30 years or whatever it is of making websites. Um, so yeah, definitely recommend setting that stuff. That's the bare minimum that every site needs to be. Uh, the next one is tracking the conversions, and that means what people are, what you want people to do on your website, whether that's if you have, like, a blog and you just want pe- and you're trying to build an email newsletter. You need to track every time someone subscribes to your email newsletter. Like, you know, whether it's, you know, that subscribe form in the middle of a blog post, in the footer, whatever. You gotta track every entry point. How do you do that? E-commerce store, the most obvious, making purchases. You know, if you have l- you know, your, uh, you have, you know, landing pages for, like, your own agency, uh, you know, stuff like that, those form submissions. You need to be tracking all of those so that you can understand what's actually working. Um, and again, that's what Conversion Bridge is built to do to make that incredibly easy to set up. Um, but you know, especially for a lot of people here who are product owners, there's, you know, a lot more stuff that you can be tracking. Um, one of my other plugins, actually, I forgot to mention, is a little one that I randomly created for myself called the EDD, Easy Digital Downloads, Cancellation Survey. So that's another good data point to collect, um, that, you know, when people cancel, you survey them. "Why are you canceling your subscription?" Give them some, you know, valid reasons, and collect that data. Mm-hmm. And then every once in a while say, "Hey, what do you, uh, why are people canceling?" Uh, and then, um, and if you need to, reach out to them, talk to those customers. They rarely do call you back, but, um, once they've canceled, they're done. But, uh, but you know, it gives you some, at least some data. So that's- So Katie, what are you doing in terms of what data are you collecting, uh, from the c- from the collection side of things? So yeah, there's the analytics side of things. We've gone back to GA4, but I don't ever log in. Derek said earlier you get to never see Google Tag Manager again. Well, I think an even bigger benefit- of like Conversion Bridge is that you never see GA4's dashboard again. Um, but I, I've, I built custom reports, um, s- um, that just have everything I need on them. So I, I, I gave Zach a, a very large walkthrough of my data. It's impressive. At, um, Press Comp for quite a long time. Um, so we, we have the best data we've ever had now, and that is not from using the G- Google Analytics, um, interface. Uh, but I think we should talk more than just conversions because for me, a key thing is how people are using your products as well as that. Yeah. And I've always been terrible at this. It's always been a huge gap. And when I started building Shopify apps, I suddenly realized that they have data about how people use their products. It's a whole different thing, and Shopify people have data. WordPress people typically don't. So I started thinking, "Why don't WordPress people have data about usage?" It's technically possible if you get the right permissions, whatever. So I've rec- more recently been doing that. The first thing I did was a one-off audit of a large number of sites using our Document Library Pro plugin, and that was a huge eye-opener because I, I basically put a load of domains that were using our plugin into AI and got it to analyze things like what their industry is, what's the use case, what features of our products are they using. Like are they using the table layout for their document library or the grid? And I ha- I can't believe this. More than 40% of our users are nonprofits, and I didn't know. Um, the rest are things like healthcare, education, all really similar connected use cases, and I didn't know. Most of my plugins are WooCommerce. Uh, totally different user profile. So having that data about how people use our Document Library plug- plugin has totally transformed our marketing and positioning. And even things like knowing that the table layout is way more popular than the grid layout means that we now use a data-based way to always display the table first, say, on the product page or something. The grid is more of an afterthought to show flexibility. And so we've really drilled down into what features people are using. My next challenge is how to automate this, and I've recently used Claude Code to add a little, I don't really understand it, it's gone to the developer for review, but something which will basically take an anonymous snapshot, um, of how all our customers are using the plugin. And there's no IPs, nothing that allows us to track it to them. So we're not gonna get permission or anything because it's not identifiable. Uh, but I'm excited to do that for all our plugins because it's a much easier way to get that data about how they're using it Yeah, and when we talk about that, like the teleme- telemetry side of things, it really helps, um, it helps, but it's also, on my side, we have so many, we have a lot of different settings. We have a lot of different screens. Part of the problem, uh, that I've faced in the past is not knowing what to track, uh, because you don't want to track everything. Uh, for, you don't want to just be observing all your customers', you know, activities all the time. You don't, you can't track every single setting. Not every setting is important. So, like, deciding what to track. Derek, do you have any thoughts on, like, how to me- how to know what's worth measuring? I mean, I think, you know, as much as you can grab that isn't personally identifiable information is what you want to get. I mean- So when you say grab, like, uh, talk, talk to the audience here like telemetry Like, walk us through. Yeah What do you, where does it go? What do, what do you do with it? How do, how do you analyze it? What, what are you talking about? So for like in Conversion Bridge, which is a paid-only plugin at the moment, uh, I collect, you know, what plugins have you, integrations have you enabled. Um, so are you using Gravity Forms? Are you using WSForm? Are you using, you know, WPForm? There's so many, you know, form plugins. Which analytics platform are you using? Which ad platform are you using? Um, uh, it also integrates with consent banners. So what consent banners are you using? And this dictates a lot of important things for me from what I build in the software to how I do marketing. Um, and for example, uh, you know, if I know that Gravity Forms is by far the biggest form plugin that's being used by Conversion Brig- Bridge users, I want to have a good relationship with Gravity Forms. Um, you know, have, know someone over there in their support team. Um, you know, have, build a relationship or rapport, maybe be in some blog articles, talk to them at conferences, things like that. We have mutual customers. A significant portion of my customers are their customers. So it makes a lot of sense to build that relationship with that other company. Um, one other little interesting side note is WSForm, uh, which I love Mark, um, and um, but the reality is, is his plugin install count isn't nearly as high as Gravity Forms. But if you look at my Conversion Bridge data, it's the second most popular form plugin. So what's the disparity? Because Mark's done, has been an excellent advocate. He's been awesome at including me in blog articles. He mentions me in various places when, when it's appropriate and things like that. So it validates that having these business partnerships are worthwhile. It's generating sales. I have no relationship with, you know, like WPForms or, you know, some of the other ones. I've, you know, maybe smaller relationship with some of the other form plugins, too, and, and it, it, there's almost a direct correlation Of, you know, balancing, you know, popularity of the form plugin along with my level of relationship, and that shows up in the, you know, usage of, you know, the integration in my plugin. So it just proves that it's worthwhile to continue doing. Yeah, and- And then… Yeah, go on. Uh, I, I wanted to talk about, like, the, the structure of things because I always like to hear how people are actually implementing this- Okay … uh, when it comes to telemetry. Um, on our side we have, uh, for example, a GA4, like Google Analytics, uh, PostHog. We, we run both on our website, one, because PostHog can do split testing, and also we wanna kind of eventually deprecate GA4 if we're able to. Um, we have both of those going into a, um, a Google BigQuery database, which Google automatically slurps on Google Analytics data into BigQuery for free. So if you just sign up for BigQuery and connect it, it'll do that for you. And then we have our, an MCP that talks to BigQuery and is able to answer questions for us like that. Mm-hmm. Um, our plan is, and we're… that this is toward the end of the year, uh, we hope to be releasing this, is to have built-in telemetry where PostHog has app telemetry functionality. Um, so, and you- that includes surveys, that includes all this other stuff, um- Yeah that, like, um, what do you call it? Uh, the, the one through 10, like, happiness score thing, um- It has a name, I can't remember it … cus- uh, CPS or C- anyway. PostHog we're planning on integrating that, and all that will go into, uh, the, the, the BigQuery database and that makes it usable by us. So that's how we plan on collecting the data. Um, and Katie, you're just talking directly to GA4? Um, I'm talking to Claude, and that- … has access to GA4 and Search Console and everything I can throw at it really. And Derek, where are you gathering all, like where, how are you collecting, uh, this and storing it? The telemetry data specifically? Yeah. I, I have a custom database table- Mm-hmm on my site, and when someone opts in, it sends just a back-end post to my site, stores it in the database. Plus, you know, it's hashed, you know. There's a couple different things that are combined to create a unique hash to identify that one specific site so we're not, you know, re- you know, duplicating everything. It is, you know, for that individual site. But yeah, I mean, that's as complicated as I get, and then I will honestly download that as a CSV and just look through that. I mean, you know, there's, um… You know, for Conversion Bridge, there's maybe 500 sites that are doing it. Sunshine Photo Cart has, you know, maybe 1,000 sites that are opted in. I mean, there's an opt-in during onboarding settings and all that, so it is, it does ask. Uh, you know, uh, but um, but yeah, that's, you know, I don't overcomplicate it. It doesn't need to be all that difficult. So once we have this information, once we have the, the data, um, Derek, you talked about, uh, changing, like prioritizing different integrations. Katie, you talked about different default layouts. Um, what other things should, should product owners be thinking about in terms of what to do with this, uh, information? Like what, what, what does having this data then unlock as a, as a product owner? One really interesting that I, thing that I found, um, recently with my telemetry data, and I combined this with my actual sales data to confirm it, I think I did. Um, but basically I was, uh, finding that for Conversion Bridge there was, um, I f- there's a really high churn to be perfectly honest. It's something I'm struggling with And I've always had a theory about what it was, but the data I think helped validate it. And that was people install analytics, and then they never look at it because they feel overwhelmed and don't know what to do with it. Like you, Katie. Mm-hmm. They look at GA4 and go, "What do I do with this?" Mm-hmm. Which by the way- Good point … Conversion Bridge has a simplified GA4 dashboard right inside your WordPress admin. So, um, but, uh, but basically what it helped me identify was that when people canceled, and I identified that by saying when they stopped tracking. So I go, "Oh look, this person's, you know, 'cause that last time, you know, every week that I automatically sends it telemetry data. When I see it's been over like a couple months that I've been getting the last data value, I see what was, what integrations were active on their site. I noticed they only had analytics platform. What that tells me is that they… And, and again, I'm making some assumptions, making a little bit of leaps, but combine this with some survey data where the most popular, you know, response was, "I'm not using it," um, was a pop- the main reason why they chose to cancel. And you put all this story together and it starts to say it's people who only use Conversion Bridge for analytics tracking probably just go, "I'm so overwhelmed, I don't know what to do about all this data that, you know, that these analytics platforms are showing me." So that's helping me to inform and telling me that, you know, when I started Conversion Bridge, I never even considered ad platforms. Honestly, I, it wasn't even a thought. It was just people started asking for it and then it was like, well, duh, that's a no-brainer. Of course I should be adding the ad platforms. And it was pretty quick, you know, like 1.1, I started adding it, you know, after the 1.0. I think something along those lines. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so it, it helped, you know, confirm some of the things that ad platforms are just as important. And now I s- my marketing is around getting people who are ad marketing professionals, because those are the people that tend to stick around. Some other things, ideas I have are, um, help it, helping people surface insights from their own analytics or giving tutorials, videos, and instructions for those customers on how to use their analytics data to do surface stuff. Um, whether that's even being as, you know, I even did this to help do some research for this was connect the GA4 MCP and just ask questions. And then like Katie, you know, you notice you don't have to deal with their dashboard anymore, which is insane. I mean, that's the whole reason why I created Conversion Bridge was to stop using the GA4 dashboard- Mm-hmm … um, and go to an alternative analytics platform. Um, so yeah, so those are some… That was one of the really interesting things that I found, um, in researching going through my telemetry data. Hmm. Yeah, I think that's a really good idea doing all sorts of things. Like, ads are just as confusing to manage, and people pay a lot of money to a management company really just to look at the dashboard and make recommendations. Well, I've got a couple of, uh, thoughts/questions. Um, one is about what you are doing regarding event-driven emails, because that's another way we can use the data. So are you identifying that somebody is only using Google Analytics with Conversion Bridge and sending them an email highlighting what else it could do? I am not going that far yet. M- that does It's tough because like I said, it is, I mean, I guess you could do it within the plugin itself and surface some other things within, you know, the plugin settings and other things. We notice that. I'm not doing, you know, sending it back to my site, 'cause again, it's not identifiable, so I can't then from my marketing site email them. So it could be something within the plugin itself that help surface them, "Hey, you, you know, it does these other things. Don't forget." It could be, you know, some simple things. These settings aren't enabled, just wanted to make sure you were aware of that. But it, where do you nag versus, you know, is it annoying versus that? You gotta find that with your users and, and how you present it in the UI, I think. But I think that's, you know, just making sure that people understand what they, what your product Make sure they know everything it offers, um, which I think there's other ways to inform and educate around that. We- Yeah … uh, we've been, uh, digging into our data as well, and one of the important parts of our, uh, funnel for the sales funnel is our demo sites, and we've been trying to really understand the relationship of signups versus conversions versus, uh, just people not actually configuring the demos. So one of the things that we are excited about is adding additional telemetry to our plugin so that we better understand our demos from that angle as well. Um, but we were diving in and we saw that, uh, if people didn't click into our website from the demo after signing up for the demo within, like, 48 hours or something, then they were not going to convert ever. But the people who did were more likely. So the, the whole causation correlation thing is, is a question, but we decided, okay, somebody signs up for a demo, we've got to email them more in the first 48 hours than we thought we were. Like, we were just doing an email for confirmation, an email for onboarding, and then a one more… You know, we weren't pushing the first 48 hours as hard as we are going to now, knowing that people convert better if they, if they follow up with us, uh, in that short amount of time. Where's that data coming from? I assume you're using InstaWP. We are actually current… We are using InstaWP. They have a web hook that connects to FluentCRM. Um, and so we do have… And then FluentCRM has a way to, uh, you know, show the connection between who's purchased from, um, so, like, it connects through their email address for the email that they use for the demo. So if they've purchased with the same email that they sign up with the demo, then we know that they've converted. But how do you know when they've clicked through to your website? Uh, because Conversion Bridge does a heck of a job tracking. Um- Yeah … when, when somebody signs up, uh, we hash their email, I think. Or, I don't know, it's… Whatever the hash that we is, that we use on the demo matches the hash. I don't know. You, you could answer that be- better than I can, Derek. How does this work? Why is it working? I don't understand your setup, so, uh- … not sure, but I'm sure there's… Yeah, you guys got it. Uh, we have a comment, uh, from Billy Bob Jim Patton, who writes, "Interaction should be the trigger, and it sh- also tells you what is important by virtue of people using it." So they're suggesting, when I, when I was positing, like, it's hard to know what to track, uh, that interaction is re- a really good indicator. That's good feedback. Also, somebody wrote, uh, Ross Marsali wrote, "I install Conversion Bridge on every new site." As do I. Uh, so okay. We've got, we've got the data, we've got, you know, analysis. What, how do we know that any of this is accurate? Like, how do we know, like how do we actually determine whether what we're doing, uh, makes sense? I mean, that's, there's… Your, uh, your data is never gonna be 100%. And if you think that it's going to be, you're fooling yourself, and you're reaching for a goal that is, I don't even think is necessary. Like trying to receive 100% across every metric on page speed insights. It's like, you got 98, you know, you're good. You don't need to get 100%. Um, you're obsessing over something that is infaticilly in my opinion. Um, but yeah, you wanna grab as much data as you can. Uh, yeah, and some of the ways you can validate it is by talking to people and making sure that what they're saying also corroborates what you're seeing in data. So talking to real people, real customers, real things. So, you know, I have an agency program. People can, if you have an agency, you can sign up, get your own free license, and in return, or own free license for your own agency site. In return, I get to ask you questions first before I even release the license to you. Um, and it's gathering pain points, but also marketing research. Where did you hear about me? Where'd you see this? And then just seeing if the general overall, okay, it looks like 20% are coming from search, 20, you know, something like that. Okay, that's aligning with what I'm generally seeing in, in analytics, and that's one way that you can help just corroborate that what you are seeing generally looks right. Yeah, that- Mm … you know, one way that you can do it One of the things we've been doing is, um, going through… Like, one of the best data sources that we have as, as plugin owners is, uh, the customer support tickets that we have collected over the years. And so when, when it comes to making data d- driven decisions, um, one of the things I've been trying to do is, okay, here's what I wanna work on, you know? Uh, here's, here's what I w- really care about. I, I'm passionate about doing, implementing this little pet project. Let me make sure that anybody literally any of our customers over the past 12 years has ever asked for this or, um, would want this. Uh, and having AI and MCPs into Help Scout and, and, um, the, the Google search, the BigQuery database that I have, uh, ingests all that as well. I can do a query now and say like, "Okay, what customers would be affected by this, uh, feature, and what should I actually be building instead?" So, uh, that has helped guide some of the recent product decisions, is like having AI say, "Okay, AI, do your thing. Go to town. Okay, Fable, you know, you're back in action. Uh, read through all of our customer support, categorize it, uh, identify the things that would make the biggest people… biggest impact for the most people." And it used to be that that would take tons of time. But with AI, it's easier to categorize and to, to analyze what people are actually asking for. Um, have you done something similar, Katie? Yeah. Well, I use your MCP for Help Scout. So y- um, I use that for various things. Even things like, um, evaluating performance or something. Um, are there any particular trends, positive or negative, with different support engineers or something like that, as well as looking for customer things, as you say. But you can also hook your AI up to, AI up to things like, um, your project management tool. We use ClickUp, GitHub. Yesterday I was preparing for someone's annual appraisal and I wanted data, and so I had it go in and look at their time sheets on ClickUp and their commits and things like that on GitHub and send me some sort of quali- uh, quantitative performance information about their output and so on. Um, so you can use it for pretty much anything. I have automated reports to help me get data about my team each week. So if I have a one-to-one with that team member e- that week, it will send me a report about what they've been working on in, since the previous call, how many hours they've tracked on each task, and things like that, so I can say, "Hang on. Why have you spent 100 hours on that small feature?" Or something and, and identify problems before they get as serious as they would have done before I had that data. Well, we always had the data, but I couldn't be bothered to find it before. It's easy now. Yeah. I would agree. The MCPs and AI make data analysis really easy. I do recommend running it through, you know, if you have Claude and ChatGPT, do both. Um, I recently, you know, asked it to help me with some financial statements and sort some things out. One got it wild. I was, I just looked at it and was like- You're rich. Then- You're poor. Like Yeah. I mean, one was, like, way off. And then- … you know, I had to, like, "That doesn't look right. Can you try again?" It did again. So then I was like, "Okay, now the other one, can you do it?" And on the first try, then the two matched, you know. But the first time it definitely got it wrong, so it validated. But, you know, I use it to validate. It's great. I connect it to, you know, AI to the various analytics platforms. Like, I think I have six or seven different analytics platforms running right now on Conversion Bridge WP right now, just to test them all out and so that I can verify and validate it. I, you know, dog food in my own plugin. Uh, and then honestly, what I do is then I, I take the EDD export of my orders CSV file and say, "Here's my actual orders. What are you seeing in Google Analytics? What are you seeing in Plausible? What are you seeing in, um, PostHog? What are you seeing in all these other platforms?" And it has a 99.9% accuracy, so great. Things are working. It's actually recording all the purchases and all the platforms as I would ex- going back a little bit, that's also one way to validate your tracking data, um, is to do something like that. And we've had conversations on WP products I think that you should check out, uh, you, the listener, about, um, support and about, uh, making decisions around problematic customers or customers that take a lot of support time. Uh, having AI analyze the value versus the cost of providing customer support is a great way to make decisions about how much different licenses should cost, about whether or not to, uh, say goodbye to certain customers who are using a lot of your support time, if that is a thing, um, or whether to reach out to customers that haven't engaged with you yet, uh, which is a sign of potential churn. Um, you know, there's, there's a lot of things like that that, um, even if we had the, had the data in the past, AI really unlocks Hey, that's fantastic. My, my biggest thing is that, frankly, I see the most is a customer that a month later says, "I want a refund." I'm like, "You have… This doesn't work," or, "It doesn't have this feature." I'm like- Right … " There's no support tickets yet. What? Why out of nowhere are you just saying, 'I want a refund, it doesn't work'? Well, you never asked me." Um, you know, so maybe jumping in front of those people before that. It's like, "We haven't heard anything from you. We're just checking in, you know. I wanna make sure that you don't have any questions." Ideally, it's because you have such phenomenal documentation and easy-to-use product, but it's also worth just being like, "Hey, I noticed there's no support tickets. Just wanna make sure everything's good." Yeah. That's definitely worth doing. Um, and a minute ago Zach briefly referred to pricing, which is another really great way you can use data. Uh, I used to use the agency Ellipsis to do a huge pricing analysis for me every six months, but now I've built a tool using Claude, obviously, which, uh, does the an- analysis of my plugin using the same, um, m- research data and things that Ellipsis used to use. So that's for each of our products. It goes through pricing history. I've entered the entire pricing history, so it can, um, marry that up against, like, conversion rates and sales and revenue and profitability and all of that stuff in order to make a recommendation on whether we should make any further price changes. And I've also got that working against the baseline, 'cause things are down for a lot of product companies, including us, at the moment. Obviously, it's gonna say, "Oh, your revenue's gone down since you made that price change." But I've put some baseline across our entire portfolio so that that would hopefully cancel out any false recommendations and look at what we should have revenue-wise, and that's really good. Also, we use it for lifetime pricing, because we have a target of about 15% revenue for each product comes from lifetime licenses, so it calculates what that currently is and makes recommendations for me on whether to increase or decrease the lifetime license price. So all of that's based on data, and is a really good way to improve your profitability. You mentioned something, you know, like how, you know, your, your product's going down and AI might suggest something based, because it happened to be when you changed some pricing, but maybe there's other big events going on in the world or in search engines, all this kind of stuff. And one of the things that, one of the things I wanted to mention as another important thing is, especially for people like myself who are solo, you know, solo developers or people who are very small businesses, two to three-man teams, is to also overlay not just we made a price change, but things like I went through a divorce. I went through, you know, I had a child. I went on vacation or these other things, because when you're that small, your personal life can affect what you're seeing in the data. And if you feed just raw, you know, that data to an AI, it's gonna look at all that, but it doesn't… You've really gotta give it the full context. I think I've shared it on my Twitter profile once, but if you look at my Sunshine Photo Cart chart, my sales chart. Um, and I, I actually put on there, like, the date of, you know, my divorce finalized. And if you go to one year ahead of time, you all of a sudden see this like boop, boop, boop, boop, boop down. And I go, "Yeah," because I mean, I didn't obviously go through personal issues on that one date. It started probably around that time, and my focus and I- was less, I was much more distracted. And it wasn't because of probably any, you know, I added a documentation article or added a new feature or anything like that. It was purely my, what was going in my personal life. My scale is gonna absolutely affect your business, so even including those things on a chart, your timeline. Like, you can do that in many analytics platforms. You can put, "This happened." And it's not just we, we, we released this, you know, we did this promo with whatever company. Put on there, like, "Had a baby" because that's something that can really impact your business at… You know, I think a lot of people listening to this are probably on that smaller end scale. And that can impact what happens. So I think those life events are just as important as those site redesigns, um, and things like that to consider in what's affecting where your business is at. That's a great point, and I, I am heartened by that point as well because AI, until it eats all of our lunches, is enabling us to do incredible things where, um, even if we are on vacation, um… I went on a vacation last week and, and it was wonderful. I went to the beach. Before I went to the beach, I started a Fable session and I said, "Do this stuff," you know, like, "Here's what I want. Here's the goal for the day." And I came back and it was incredible, uh, the amount of work that was done. And then I would, you know, do it again the next day, and I wasn't actively, like, working, but it, I was getting stuff done. So as a solopreneur, uh, that would've just been life-changing for me back in, like… And now as a, as a small team, it still is really cool to be saying like, "Yeah. Hey, hey, team, I took two weeks off. Here's all the stuff I got done." Yeah. So, um, you know, a lot of what we've talked about is measuring and making decisions. There's… Is there an aspect of privacy that we haven't really talked about and, like, the dark side of data collection? And I mean, Europeans listening to us, I, I love you. I'm a, I'm an American, I'm sorry. Uh, we don't care. I, I mean, obvi- We all care deeply about privacy. America doesn't care about privacy. Um, what… How do y'all think about privacy and, like, the implications of getting to know your customer better from, like, having enough data points in a data set that represents their desires? Isn't that, is, is that weird? What do you think about that? I mean, I would say I lean more towards the American point of view too as well. Where, you know, if I visit a website, accept, accept, accept. Yeah, have all my things. Know that I went to this website. I'm a marketer too. I hope you learned something from this. Um, you know, from my little visiting your webpage, I, I want you to do that, you know? I, I always see it as you can walk into a physical retail store and have security cameras that can audit, and you can watch where people go in your store. I want to be able to do the same thing on my website. I want to see where people go in my store. Are they going to look at this product? Are they staying here? How long are they staying on it? All kinds of stuff. Well, and yet that's all creepy stuff. The smile- Yeah, I know … you're on camera signs are just like, "Oh, smile, you have no taste." Like, how do we prevent that from being, uh- Yeah, it's- … from us being creepers? Yeah. I mean, uh, I mean, that's why there's a lot of laws out there. That's why there's privacy first analytics platforms, why Conversion Bridge exists, so that, that you can actually use those privacy first analytics platforms and actually track conversions there. And pri- by the way, for, for those listening, and I'm… Conversion Bridge isn't the only platform that does this, but, um, it integrates really well with CookieYes, uh, which is the service we use for cookie consent. Um, that is a huge pain in the neck if you don't have a service like Conversion Bridge, uh, to configure. But we h- we use CookieYes. If people opt in, then all the stuff, uh, gets loaded for analytics, and it also can run only in, in European nations and nations that care about that type of thing. We don't have cookies consent in the US, uh, which is nice. It was weird when I went to- it was, it was weird when I went to Europe and every webpage I pulled up- It was such a pain in the neck … said please- Oh my gosh It's horrible. Yeah. You know, I'm totally with you guys on this. Despite being a European, I think it's destroyed the internet. You may find we may not be fully compliant because that's my company and my choice until something happens, which it hasn't. Um, but it's just ruined everything. It's not about protecting the user if you're, as Derek said, just tick yes, yes, yes, just go away, leave me alone and let me browse the website I'm trying to visit. That is not informed consent anyway. It should clearly be done at the browser level so you only make that decision once. So I don't agree with the way the law is implemented. I would rather see a more common sense approach. Uh, but I'm aware of the law. Like, when I recently added that thing to our plugins, I made very careful that we haven't got anything personally identifiable because I do not want to bother my users. I don't think it harms them if I know they're using a table or a grid layout and I don't even know who they are for their document library. So I made sure I built it in a way that bypassed the consent issue because I don't agree with bothering people about this stuff. Yeah. And that's one thing, you know. You use the privacy focused analytics platforms like Plausible or, or some of these other ones. There's tons of them, literally tons of them there nowadays. They are built in a way that do not use cookies. They gather the data in other ways so you can- You read their websites, they say that by using our analytics platform, this itself does not require you to have a cookie banner on. You may have something else on your website, a different plugin or anything like that on your WordPress website that does that. But, um, but that analytics platform doesn't necessarily… Platforms. Yes, you need to have a, a cookie consent for that part. Um, so, uh, yeah. So, yeah, Billy Bob makes a great point here and says, uh, "You trade your privacy for convenience in many cases." Um, that is true. Um, I wanna, uh, we, we end every show with best advice, but before we do that, I wanted to g- hit one more topic that we haven't really talked about. In terms of data-driven decision making, it's not fun. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to even come up with it. Uh, we haven't talked about user surveys. What do y'all… How do you handle that? Katie, uh, what, what do you, what do you do for user surveys? Um, I have done surveys. No one ever replies. You send it to 20,000 people, and you get a few responses. So, I don't think that's necessarily the best way to get feedback. I do get some responses to an i- an email which looks very personal that we send, I think, a week after purchase. It's signed by me. It's got my picture on. It says, "I read all responses," which I actually do. That is assigned to me in Help Scout, that particular one. And we do get some really good responses via that email, because it looks individual and personal. It's just like, "Thanks for buying the plugin. I w- hope you don't mind if, I'd love it if you'd answer just a few questions" with, like, three bullets. How did you find us? Is there anything that nearly stopped you buying from us? That kind of thing. So, because it's personal and it's not some sort of data-feeding statistical thing, people do actually respond to that. Often, like yesterday, there was one that gave me some really good keywords for one of my WooCommerce plugins and using terminology that was specific to his industry that he said everybody uses and I'd never heard of. So, that's a keyword opportunity. But I think any wider things that I would call a survey, I've had very poor responses and don't bother with much. Hm. Yeah, I mean, I've run surveys and, but same thing. Um, the response rate, you know, I sent, I think, out to, like, 3,000 people, I think, my Sunshine Photo Cart list. I think about five were really active. And then, uh, you know, about those, got about 40 answers, and I was asking about- hosting stuff. And also about like what add-ons maybe they were interested in and they could sort, sort out what's, you know, what's going… Or I could determine what add-on to be building next, what's important to those users. And, you know, 40 responses is enough to make, at least help. Yeah. But again, you know, uh, it really helps to continually talking to customers, you know. You are on this one would be drilling that in our heads over and over and over again. Um, uh, you certainly drill it in my head. But, uh, but yeah, talking to customers and you can get those real answers from them directly so that, you know, you're not… You can get actual answers on what, you know, all kinds of things, um, straight from customers. Yeah, we do, uh, we do customer surveys. We've done customer surveys recently, um, when it came to a new product that we were planning to build, and we asked a lot of questions surrounding the, the problem set to find out is this something that people have, uh, a problem with, our existing customers. 'Cause one of the, one of the advices that Chris Lena gives is to sell to your customers. Um, if your customers ne- have another problem, then solve that next. Uh, I think that's really good advice. Um, and so we were trying to determine, uh, do they have this problem? And then it w- it's so hard to know if that's, uh… If they do have the problem, is that a good thing? Or if they have the problem, um, does that mean that you're self-selecting by the customers that you already have and, and you're not actually representing, uh, uh, the larger problem set that, you know, the wider internet has than just your own customers. So it's, that's… We do them, but we also aren't exactly sure, uh, what to take from them all the time. And there's a whole… For, for people who are thinking about customer, uh, surveys, there's a whole data science aspect of it. There are tons of books about writing the right, writing good surveys. Uh, it takes a lot of effort to really think through the questions you're asking and make sure that they're, they're sound. So do your research about how to write a survey in, in the first place. Don't just come up with what you think is what you wanna know, 'cause that's not always the thing you should be asking. Well, hardly agree there. And the only other point I think you started touching on it was, you know, you're, if you do a survey to your existing customers, like I said, "Hey, what new add-ons do you want?" But those are already customers who bought with the existing set of features. Right. That was enough to convince them. If there's features that you wanna convince other people to finally buy your- You need to talk to non-customers, like what's missing? Yeah. So, and that, and so that's hard to ask those questions to people you don't have their email address for yet. Mm-hmm. So that's, you know, customers is a, is a tricky one, but it's still something I think it's worth doing. Good point. So, uh, we end every show with our best advice, and, uh, where we ask a quick question, like something you would say in the elevator if somebody asked you this question. What's your best advice for something, somebody thinking about data-driven decision making? Uh, Katie, you wanna go first? My best advice is to use the data. Lots of people collect it and think, "Job done", but that's not how it works. There is absolutely no point in having data if you're not actively using it to improve your products and your business. So if you've installed something like Conversion Bridge, actually set yourself maybe a regular reminder or something like that, even if it's every three months, to go through the data. Uh, really find those opportunities for improvement. How about you, Derek? I think it's to make sure that you look at the data from all angles, because data can actually trick you. I had one data point. This is something that I discovered and I think was really helpful, helped alleviate a lot of anxiety for me, was I noticed that there's a lot of people, uh, my, 61% of my licenses are, um, single site licenses, which goes against everything I thought would happen when I was selling Conversion Bridge. I absolutely thought agencies buying multi-site licenses would gobble this up and be the primary thing that I was selling. You know, it's a fundamental thing, page builder, your form plug-in, Conversion Bridge, you know, it's part of your stack. And then what I realized, uh, but I was really disheartened when I learned that 60 per- 60, 61% of my licenses were single site. I just was like, "Oh, man. My agency program isn't really doing what I thought it would do", and all this kind of stuff. But when I did that, I was doing some research on my programmatic SEO efforts. And what that means is, you know, someone searches Give WP Google Ads conversion tracking, something very specific, which I have eight landing pages for every single one of those combinations on Conversion Bridge. Um, but I learned that those were driving all of those single site licenses, which makes sense. They were looking for one specific problem for their exact site. They knew they were using Give WP, and you needed to track Google Ads, and so they had one problem, and they wanted to find one thing for that one site to solve it. So I was like, "Okay, I'm not doing anything wrong. It's actually a good sign that my programmatic SEO efforts are actually working." Um, so I turn, it helped me turn, reframe what I thought was a negative actually into a positive. So making sure that you're really looking at everything from all angles, uh, and data. Right, and 'cause agencies are asking different questions. Yeah. You know? Exactly. Honestly, Derek, 60 something percent is good. Um, my, I have way big more proportion single site licenses than that And I haven't, uh, recently looked at those numbers. Use the data. Uh, my best advice is to make sure you have MCPs set up to connect all your data. Derek, you shouldn't be exporting CSVs. What are you doing? There's EDD MCPs out there. Good day. Uh, similar… Like, similarly, having schedules, and this is something I need to get better on. I was just on a team call today, and I was like, "I need to set up these schedules." Uh, Cloud Code is what I use to, to develop, and it has a, a command called Schedule where you can have an automated thing that runs on a schedule and runs these reports for you. I don't do it myself. I do not do it. So I need something to do it automatically on a schedule. So that's… I'm making a public commitment here, people. I'm going to set up schedules for myself to run the reports that I already have as skills in my Cloud Code d- um, setup. So set up skills, set up MCPs, set up schedules. Get set up with automations So, uh, that's a wrap. And Derek, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, where can people find you online? Too active on X Uh, can you say that again? Your, your mic, uh, cut out … want X too much. So, um- Okay … Derek Ashauer is my username on there. You can go to derekAshauer.com to see all the projects I'm on. Um, my plugin, main plugin company is wpsunshine.com. That links to all my different products from there as well. Um, sunshinephotocard.com, conversionbridgewp.com. Nice. Perfect. Well, if you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit like, subscribe, particularly subscribe on YouTube. It really helps us out and helps to support our work. And special thanks again to Freemius. And next week, Matt Cromwell, co-host, and I will be chatting with Remy Corson about monetizing a free WordPress plugin without paywalling the core. I have questions. Uh, make sure to join us next week. Uh, thanks everybody for watching, Making Data-Driven Product Decisions, Zach Katz & Katie Keith, 01kxngn6geg5v46hymnf1w2b0p.