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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack:
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. This week, we're going to share a segment from my interview with Danny Van Cooten. He's the creator of CocoAnalytics, a plugin that takes a simpler approach to tracking your website's traffic. I encourage you to check out the entire interview over on the WP Minute Plus. Visit thewpminute.com to learn more. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.
Eric Karkovack:
So when you're building out Koko Analytics, did you take a look at Google and kind of...
Eric Karkovack:
look at it and say, OK, this is where I need to improve on what Google does. This is where they fail, and maybe I can make a positive impact.
Danny Van Kooten:
Yeah, well, to be brutally honest, I didn't look at Google Analytics at all because even back in my freelancing days, my customers expected me to install Google Analytics on their site. But then when I came back to their sites months or years later, they never even looked at it even once. Or maybe they tried to, but they just couldn't find like, how can I just see?
Danny Van Kooten:
the number of visitors because it's not on the front page of your analytics dashboard. It's buried three pages down or something like that. So I didn't really look at Google. I just wanted one page that gave you an overview of what happened on your site. So no custom reports, no multi-leveled pages, just a single page showing visitors and sources.
Eric Karkovack:
Yes.
Eric Karkovack:
That makes sense, because I think the simplicity is what people are really after. We talk about Google Analytics, and you said as a freelancer, people want you to install it. Then it's almost like an industry unto itself now that you have to be an expert at Google Analytics in order to set up the reports, in order to get the emails sent out, and just customize things to match what your clients are looking for.
Eric Karkovack:
Koko Analytics is quite the opposite of that. You install it, you can see the stats right away. Our own Matt Medeiros did a little video tour of it recently, which we'll put in the show notes, showing just basically you turn it on and it works. And of course, the pro version, you can create reports and things like that as well.
Eric Karkovack:
But there's still this expectation that Google is going to be what's used. What advice would you have for a freelancer or an agency whose client says, I really want Google Analytics, but as a freelancer, you're saying, well, I think Koko is probably the better option. What advice would you give to them?
Danny Van Kooten:
Well, yeah, what I would really like people to do is like, maybe start out with something simple like Koko Analytics, because it covers a large number of use cases. Like if you just want to see what kind of traffic you're getting, whether it's increasing month over month and where it's coming from, which I think is covering 80% of small business owners' websites or even private users.
Danny Van Kooten:
I just want the default to be something simple, like as simple as it could be. And then over time, maybe your needs are becoming more advanced and you can always slap on something on top of Koko Analytics because it's so lightweight. It doesn't get in the way. It doesn't take up any space and it's not slowing down your website. So it's easy to grow into more advanced users. And what we experienced with Koko is usually when
Danny Van Kooten:
when the default is not enough, they want custom events anyway. And even with Google Analytics, you will have to set that up. And with Koko Analytics, you can now track any type of custom events as well. So even when your use case is more advanced, it can probably be done in a simpler way than you would have with Google Analytics.
Eric Karkovack:
Yeah, and the other part of that is that you don't have to worry about Google changing their platform or making it more difficult. That's been a problem, too. I think just the switch from Google Analytics 3 to 4, that was a hassle for a lot of website owners and especially, I think, agencies that had a lot of having to go through that.
Danny Van Kooten:
Yep.
Danny Van Kooten:
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack:
A plugin like Coco, you're just basically hitting the update button when a new version comes out and you know everything still works. Which I think is nice in an age where everything seems to be getting more complicated.