Independent Analytics

Pro plugin?

Ready to go.

Launch email?

Yup.

Announcement blog post?

Let's do this.

We hit the "Send" button, sat back, and what happened next?

Crickets.

Hour after hour passed without any sales, and our conversation shifted.

"Well, we know we're onto something. People need time to evaluate the Pro version before they purchase, and it needs more features too."

I'll be honest, I was feeling pretty deflated after a few hours without a sale, and then it happened...

Our first sale!

It was instant relief and at least a morsel of confirmation that we made something people want.

Two more sales came through over the next hour, and we were happy to end the day with a high five instead of a pat on the back.

Over the next 31 days, we collected some additional sales, most of which were over $100 in value, and ended up with total sales of $2,400.

Considering we're still very early in our journey, we're pleased with this figure.

If you want to know how we did it, here’s some behind-the-scenes info on our marketing strategy.

How we promoted our launch

If you read our initial launch post, then a lot of this will sound familiar.

To reach potential buyers with news of the Pro launch, we:

• Emailed every free user who opted-in through Freemius (Mailchimp)
• Emailed all Compete Themes users (ConvertKit)
• Sent a follow-up email a week later to anyone who didn't open the first email
• Published an announcement blog post
• Shared the announcement blog post across social media accounts
• Added links to the Pro version in the free version of the plugin

Most of these were one-time launch tactics that drove early signups. Moving forward, most of our sales are going to come from people who use the free version and click an ad in the plugin’s interface to discover the Pro version. For that reason, we’re mainly focused on driving new free users, as we expect they should convert naturally into paying customers.

The WP plugin repository is an amazing source of downloads, but we don’t want to be completely reliant on it, so we’ve taken measures to optimize our site for search traffic and have just begun content marketing. It’s going to take a long time to pay off, but we’d like to see our content marketing eventually drive as many signups as the plugin repository.

What’s next?

We recently launched a feedback board with Feedbear, and users have already started upvoting and commenting on features. There are A LOT of features people want, and we’ve only just begun collecting this feedback in a documented way.

As important as marketing is, it’s clear that product development is the top priority right now. There are many people who will only use (or buy) our plugin if we get these features implemented, so that’s where our focus is now.

Alright Hackers, today’s a big day. We just released the PRO version of Independent Analytics!

It adds a new Campaign URL tracking feature, including a built-in campaign builder: https://independentwp.com/features/campaigns/?utm_source=Indie+Hackers&utm_medium=Community&utm_campaign=Launch+Post

Yes, I did just use one of our campaign links ;)

We didn’t think we’d be able to launch this fast, but we came up with an idea that would let us launch faster and provide a benefit for our customers.

How we launched early

We decided that $99/year would be a good price point for Independent Analytics Pro, but in order to justify that pricing, we would need 3-4 valuable new features. Instead of delaying the launch for the months this would take to create, we decided to launch with only the first feature and a 60% discount.

This has allowed us to ship our product much sooner and also gives our loyal early adopters a significant discount. We get immediate cash flow and they get a big discount that will stay in place for all of their future renewals. Since we'll be releasing many more features over the next year, it's a great value. Plus, it incentivizes customers to purchase more expensive licenses to get a bigger discount.

We'll be reducing this discount a bit every time we release a new feature, so there's also some urgency to boot.

Moving forward, I'll be posting more details on how the launch went and our development progress, so please follow if you want to keep up with our product!

As of today, our plugin page on wordpress.org tells us we have over 700+ Active Installs: https://wordpress.org/plugins/independent-analytics/

The thing about the Active Installs metric is that it only counts websites that have been logged into in the last 24 hours. I have sites I don't log into every day but still view as active projects, so this metric sells the install count a bit short.

After comparing with data from Freemius, our estimates tell us the number of sites running Independent Analytics is approximately 2x the Active Install count, which puts us at around 1,400 sites. Not bad, considering the launch was only a month and a half ago.

There are a few tactics we've used so far to get to this point.

WordPress.org SEO

Most of the code that runs wordpress.org itself is open source, and believe it or not, that includes the search engine too! It's wild being able to optimize our plugin page according to the literal ranking factors after many years of guesswork with Google.

Freemius has an excellent guide on how to rank your plugin using this info: https://freemius.com/blog/seo-on-new-plugin-repository/

While it's great being able to see the ranking factors, it also means everyone else can see it too. At the end of the day, optimizing your plugin page is extremely important, but it doesn't mean you'll shoot straight to the top. It just puts you in the running.

We recently became the #16 result for "analytics," which is awesome considering how much lower our install counts are than the surrounding plugins. We expect this ranking to improve over time as we get more reviews and installs.

Promoted to my existing audience (Compete Themes)

It helped a lot to already have a business in the WordPress space. There are three ways I leverage my existing platform to promote Independent Analytics.

Added a recommendation inside my themes

This has been the most effective tactic so far.

I used the TGM Plugin Activation library to add a recommendation for Independent Analytics inside all of my themes. Our daily downloads spiked when I added this to all the themes over the course of two days, and since then, downloads have stayed consistent at around 30/day.

Promoted across the blog

I published a handful of articles promoting our plugin and included sidebar ads in nearly every article page. This hasn't been a game changer, but it definitely added a few more daily downloads.

Sent to my email list

I sent an email broadcast to my 20,000 subscribers when Independent Analytics first came out and added recommendations into a few of my autoresponder series.

To be honest, I think people give email marketing a lot more credit than it deserves, but it was still helpful. The broadcast didn't drive a ton of installs, but it did generate some excellent feedback via personal notes people left me and a few reviews on wordpress.org.

Most of the people that replied are folks that I've developed a relationship with after emailing back and forth about WP and helping them with their sites over the past 8 years running Compete Themes.

In other words, the results didn't come from using some amazing email marketing tool. The results I got were from building connections with customers over the years. These people are happy to support me and check out anything new I'm working on because of how much I've helped them.

List post outreach

To get more eyeballs on Independent Analytics, I reached out to every site I could find that published an article including a list of WP analytics plugins (or something closely related).

I asked if they could include my plugin and offered to send them original content for their post. I also offered to give them a link from competethemes.com in return.

This is something I'd done in the past for my plugin, Strive, so I had a handful of contacts established already that I knew would help promote Independent Analytics.

This is an extremely valuable tactic for two reasons. The first is obvious: people find your product in the list and try it out. The second is more subtle...

When bloggers are writing list posts, they often check out other list posts to source their own. So, once you start showing up in some via manual outreach, other bloggers will find your product and include it on their own. In other words, you're potentially landing many future placements for each list post you get included in.

Conclusion

In summary, a lot of these tactics involved leveraging an existing business, and I hope that's not too discouraging if you're just getting started out. The lesson here is to get started ASAP and be good to everyone who supports you so that things get easier in the future.

Revenues?

Right now, we're making the free plugin as awesome as it can be, but we're almost ready to tackle the paid version.

I'll be back with some more info about that (and maybe some revenue figures) next time I write.

Thanks for reading!

I've been building websites with WordPress since 2010, and in that time, the only analytics solution I've ever used has been Google Analytics.

I don't think I'm alone.

For many years, I became so used to adding Google Analytics when creating a new site I never even questioned if there was anything better. And for most of the time, there really wasn't.

It wasn't until the past few years (since GDPR) that privacy-focused analytics have arisen to compete with GA, as they should, seeing how GA is outright illegal in some countries, like Germany.

But while I was investigating this issue, I found that the new competitors were still missing a lot.

GA has a tremendous amount of data, but it's so hard to get the reports to work the way you want. It's hard to record conversion and sales data in the first place, let alone create reports that display this info how you want. The new analytics tools don't do it any better than GA.

And that's when it hit me.

I've always used WordPress, so why not create an analytics solution for WordPress built entirely as a plugin?

This has enabled us to build the first page-based analytics solution. I'll explain.

Normally, an analytics program lives entirely on the front-end, so it only knows about your site's URLs and how visitors behave on them. Independent Analytics is different.

When someone visits your site, and you have Independent Analytics running, it records the view, but it also knows everything WordPress does. This means instead of simply displaying the URL and associated metrics, we can display the page title, the author, the category, and more, all alongside metrics like Views and Visitors.

This becomes extremely valuable when combined with a simple filtering system. It takes seconds to create a report that shows metrics for only your Posts or Posts published since the beginning of 2022.

Those types of reports can't be generated in Google Analytics without custom development, nor will the new data apply retroactively.

As you can imagine, this will become even more valuable in the future as we release specific integrations with sales data from WooCommerce and email optin data from plugins like MailOptin.

Users will have end-to-end metrics showing them the customer path from the site that referred them to the products they purchased, all with zero configuration.

As you can tell, we're proud of what we've made, but there's a lot more work to do!

As I'm writing this, we have a new Geolocation report on the way and plans to add Saved Reports too. Make sure to follow along here if you want to keep up with our developments.