Tracking eCommerce in WordPress

If you run any type of eCommerce site, it’s important to understand how visitors found your site and which specific entry pages led to a conversion. Tracking data can also let you know the type of content or marketing that is worth investing in.

Here’s a screenshot from a basic eCommerce dashboard I have set up in Google Analytics for a client with a WooCommerce shop (some data changed to make anonymous):

woocommerce-dashboard

Seeing the top referrers, landing pages, and revenue at a glance is great. But once the eCommerce data is in Google Analytics, you also drill down and answer very specific questions.

For instance, is an ad campaign on one site performing better than another? Should ad traffic be sent to the home page or the shop page? What is the conversion rate (or total revenue numbers) for visitors from Google who landed on an article page via an organic search? Continue reading

Custom Links in the Customizer

custom-upsell

Adding custom links or markup to the theme customizer can be a bit difficult since everything is injected with javascript rather than the normal PHP toolkit. However, there are a number of use scenarios where this might be useful.

One common use case for theme authors might be to add a documentation link or an upsell link so users can find out about theme features.

The approach I like the best is one I first saw employed by the Theme Foundry with their theme “Make”. Their upsell link is prominent, but it doesn’t detract too much from the theme customization experience or take up too much space in the limited UI.

make-upsell

This tutorial takes a similar approach, but shows how to add a styled link to the “Active Theme” section. Continue reading

Concepts for Custom Theme Development

If you’re new to WordPress development, there’s a couple techniques that will be incredibly useful when building themes for a specific company or purpose. Most WordPress themes available are built for general use, but when adapting it for a specific site it’s usually necessary to hardcode at least a few specific elements rather than make everything dynamic.

For example, it might make sense to hardcode the menu if it requires a lot of custom styling. It might make sense to query for specific pieces of known content. Certain pages may have a lot of art direction or targeted styles that would be incredibly difficult to build a custom UI for.

If you’ve already built a few custom themes, it’s likely know a many of these tips already- but hopefully there’s a few gems that will be useful for your toolkit. Continue reading