The Facebook Pixel is a core part of how the Facebook Ads platform works. This is the analytics code that Facebook advertisers use to target certain groups of people with ad campaigns – such as people who previously interacted with their store or made a purchase.

You can’t advertise on Facebook without using the Facebook Pixel. Luckily, if your store is built on WordPress and WooCommerce, integrating the Pixel into your store is extremely easy. You don’t need any programming knowledge at all.

Read on, and we’ll explain just how you can add the Facebook Pixel to your WooCommerce website, as well as how to start using the Pixel and Facebook Ads to grow your sales.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

Do you ever wonder why, as soon as you start looking into a topic online, you automatically start getting ads about that topic in your Facebook feed?

The Facebook Pixel is why.

The Facebook Pixel is what drives Facebook advertising. It lets advertisers show ads to people who have interacted with or visited their site.

It does this with a piece of code, installed on the advertiser’s site. This code tracks the user’s action (such as viewing a page, or clicking an element), and tries to match that to a Facebook profile.

The advertiser can then use this data to send specifically crafted ads, or create a specific audience for ad targeting based on events taken on their site.

Basically, the Facebook Pixel links the Facebook Ads platform with external sites, allowing much deeper targeting and conversion tracking for advertisers.

How Does the Facebook Pixel Match Events to Users?

The exact details of how the Facebook Pixel is able to match an event taking place on your site to a user’s Facebook profile are a little technical. But in simple terms, it basically uses data stored on your browser or device to detect the user’s Facebook profile.

For example, if you’re used to being automatically logged on when you open Facebook, Facebook can probably match your profile to pixel events on another site.

While this may sound a little creepy, it’s really a win-win. Advertisers get to target the right people for their products, and Facebook users only see ads that are likely to be of interest to them.

All this data is heavily encrypted as well, so it’s basically impossible for your data to be leaked, or for advertisers to contact you personally based on Pixel data.

Why the Facebook Pixel is Essential for WooCommerce Stores

Advertisers can reach people based on demographics, interests, life events and more info from their Facebook profiles.

However, a more powerful and accurate method of targeting is to show ads to people who have taken certain actions on your website.

A person who has browsed a few pages on your store, or added an item to their cart but didn’t yet purchase, is much more likely to respond to one of your ads, than a random person who you think fits your audience persona.

The Facebook Pixel lets you do this. You can run what we call “retargeting” ads, targeting users who have interacted with you before, which traditionally have a much lower ad spend per conversion.

The Pixel also allows conversion tracking, which helps Facebook optimize your ad targeting, again lowering ad costs.

This means, when someone clicks on your ad and takes the action you want them to take (such as making a purchase), Facebook’s software can see this. Once you get a decent number of conversions, Facebook will automatically optimize your ads to show to the people who are (based on the Pixel’s data) most likely to result in a conversion.

Read more about Facebook’s ad delivery optimization system.

Highly focused targeting, Facebook conversion tracking and automatic ad optimization are incredibly powerful tools to have, and help you keep ad costs down a lot. It can be the difference between making a profit on your ads or making a loss.

So, for sites that rely on Facebook Ads to drive traffic to their store, using the Facebook Pixel is an absolute must. Even if you don’t plan to yet, it’s a good idea to install the Pixel on your website anyway, so it can start generating data that will help you if you ever do want to run ads.

How to Install the Facebook Pixel on your WooCommerce Store

There are a few ways you can add the Facebook Pixel to your WooCommerce site. 

While the code may look a little intimidating for non-programmers, there are extremely simple methods you can use, that require just a point and click to set up.

Let’s look at your three options now.

Option One: Install Pixel Code Manually

You can set up a manual Facebook Pixel integration by simply pasting a code snippet into the header of your site.

You’ll need to go into Facebook Ads Manager, and find the Events Manager screen. 

(If you’ve never touched Facebook Ads before, you may have to create a business account and a page for your brand first.)

Create your Facebook Pixel first. Give it a name, so you can identify it as the Pixel for your site.

Now Facebook will ask how you want to install the base Pixel code. If you want to do it manually, hit Install code manually.

Copy the base code shown, and paste it into your site’s code, between the <head> tags on any pages you want the Pixel to track.

To easily add it to every page on your site, either add it to your theme, or use a plugin like the Insert Headers and Footers plugin.

This will install the base code – which means the Pixel will track Page View events. To add more events to track, you’ll need to add a new line of code to your Pixel code for each event, or use the Facebook Event Setup Tool to help do this.

Setting up the code manually is not the best option, as it’s easy to make a small mistake in the code, causing your Pixel to not work. It also takes more time to manually add code yourself.

It’s easier to use plugins to add the Pixel to your site and set up events for Facebook conversion tracking on WooCommerce.

Option Two: Facebook for WooCommerce Plugin

Facebook offers a free plugin to connect and install the Pixel on your WooCommerce site. As well as installing the Pixel, this plugin tracks events like Lead, View Content, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout and Purchase.

While this plugin is the official plugin from Facebook, the user reviews are not great, at 2.3 stars out of 5 on WordPress.org.

So, despite being Facebook’s official WooCommerce Facebook Pixel plugin, this is not the best option to install and manage the Pixel for your WooCommerce store.

Option Three: Use a Third-Party Plugin like Pixel Cat

Enter option three – a third-party WordPress plugin built to provide Facebook Pixel integration on WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Pixel Cat does just this. It lets you install the Pixel, build events and set up custom triggers from the plugin dashboard, which takes away all the trickiness of copying and pasting code that often leads to little errors.

It integrates directly with WooCommerce, making it a great choice for e-commerce store owners on WordPress.

To add the Pixel to your site with Pixel Cat, just go to the “plugins” tab in your WordPress dashboard. Hit “Add New”, search “Pixel Cat”, and install and activate the free plugin.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, add your Pixel ID in the main page of the plugin’s dashboard, and hit “Save”.

Testing Your Pixel

Whichever method you choose to install the Facebook Pixel on your site, it’s a good idea to test and check it’s working as intended.

A small thing missing in the code can cause the entire thing to break, which can be a huge pain if you start running traffic to your site, thinking the Pixel has been tracking your users.

Once you’ve added the Pixel to your site, get the Google Chrome Facebook Pixel Helper extension. This is a simple browser extension that shows data about any Facebook Pixels installed and working on the page you’re viewing.

With this, checking your Pixel is very simple. Just go to a page where you want the Pixel to be working. Check the extension – if no Pixel is installed, the icon will be greyed out. Otherwise, it will be light blue, with a number indicating how many events are firing.

Click on the extension to view more details about which events are firing. You’ll usually see “PageView” or “ViewContent” here, to start with.

If you want to track more specific events, such as an event that fires after a time or scroll delay, or something like “Add to Cart” or “Purchase”, you can perform this event yourself, and check it shows up as you intended by clicking the Pixel Helper icon.

How Pixel Cat Integrates with your WooCommerce Store

Pixel Cat’s WooCommerce integration is one of the reasons it offers so much value. This integration saves WooCommerce store owners a ton of time setting up the events you need to grow your store with Facebook Ads.

The integration works with just one click. In the plugin dashboard, go to the E-Commerce tab, and turn on “Track Shopping Events”.

This automatically tracks the events Add To Cart, Add Payment Info, Purchase, View Content, Search, and Add to Wishlist, along with relevant parameters.

Parameters are things like value, currency, and product name. These are particularly important for e-commerce stores, where you may want to retarget users who bought a certain product, or spent a certain amount.

The WooCommerce Facebook Pixel integration from Pixel Cat has two more powerful features for store owners: Advanced Matching and Dynamic Product Feeds.

Advanced Matching

Advanced Matching is a tool that helps match a higher number of Facebook Pixel events to Facebook users.

The Facebook Pixel doesn’t have a 100% success rate matching events to profiles. Whether a user is logged out of Facebook when they performed an event, was on an unfamiliar device, is blocking cookies, or any other reason, there will be a bit of a disparity between the number of events and the number attributed in Facebook.

For example, if you had 100 Add to Cart events, and wanted to retarget all these people with ads, your ads may only reach 70 profiles.

With Advanced Matching, the Pixel searches for additional information or metadata it can use to match events to profiles, resulting in a higher match rate.

Facebook’s help center claims Advanced Matching is proven to increase custom audience sizes, increase the number of attributed conversions, and decrease cost per conversion.

Learn more about Advanced Matching here.

Dynamic Product Feeds

The second advanced feature of Pixel Cat’s Facebook Pixel integration for WooCommerce is enabling product feeds for Dynamic Product Ads.

Dynamic Ads automatically customize your ads for different Facebook users. It uses your product catalog to create a number of variations, and automatically picks the best one to show.

Let’s say you had 15 different products, and wanted to show remarketing ads that promote a different product, based on what the user had looked at in your store.

Instead of needing to set up 15 different ads, Dynamic Ads automatically creates variations, and shows different variations based on data from the Facebook Pixel.

This is both powerful and time saving – all you need to do is add your WooCommerce product catalog link in Pixel Cat, and the plugin does the rest.

Learn more about Dynamic Product Ads.

More Advantages of the Pixel Cat Plugin

Pixel Cat offers a range of other advantages, not limited to the robust WooCommerce integration.

It lets you create custom events, which are a powerful way to enable extremely focused retargeting ads, or track very specific conversion events.

You can also set up events with custom triggers, such as if you wanted it to fire after the user has been on the page for a certain amount of time, or scrolled a certain portion of the page.

Other trigger options include firing events when the user clicks on an element (such as a button), or even just hovers over it.

Pixel Cat also supports multiple Pixels, and has dedicated support, should you need any help getting set up.

How to Utilize the Facebook Pixel with your WooCommerce Store

Wondering how exactly installing the Facebook Pixel can help you grow your WooCommerce store?

It won’t grow your sales by itself. However, setting up the Pixel, along with all the basic shopping events, enables you to do some powerful things with Facebook Ads that will bring in more sales, and allow you to run more profitable ads.

Here are some ways you can utilize the Pixel:

Retargeting

Targeting cold audiences (people who have had no interaction with your business before) is tough and unpredictable. It’s much more effective to target people who know you already.

Retargeting ads are ads that show to people who already took an action on your site, such as viewing a page, adding an item to their cart, or making a purchase.

By tracking events with the Pixel, you can set up retargeting ads to capture additional revenue for your WooCommerce store.

For example, you can retarget people who made a purchase with ads for complementary products from your store.

You could also show ads to people who viewed a product but didn’t make a purchase. Give these people an extra push to buy.

97% of first-time visitors to your site will leave without buying anything. Retargeting ads are a fantastic way to capture a percentage of those people, who otherwise would never see your site again.

Conversion Tracking

Tracking conversions is essential when you run ads. This is the only way you’re able to tell if your ads are having a positive impact.

Without conversion tracking, you could be spending more money on ads than the actual revenue that those ads create.

Setting up conversion events with the Facebook Pixel allows Facebook Ads Manager to report on this data, so you can see exactly what results you’re getting from your ad spend.

Additionally, one of the reasons Facebook Ads are so powerful is the conversion-optimized delivery system.

In simple terms, this means Facebook is able to determine which profiles are most likely to result in a conversion from your ad, based on past results. This leads to significantly better results – more conversions for less money. But it only works if the Facebook Pixel tracks your conversions and reports this data back to Facebook.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences are specific groups of people you can use as targeting groups for your ads.

Very similar to what we talked about with retargeting ads, custom audiences generally produce better results than “cold” audiences built on demographics and interests. 

While you can also create custom audiences with customer lists (like an email list), the Facebook Pixel allows you to build really effective audiences. You could create audiences for existing customers, people who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase yet, or people who had shown an interest in a specific product or product category.

Custom audiences built with the Facebook Pixel let you get super targeted with your ads, and drive the right people back to your WooCommerce store.

Lookalike audiences

An extension of the custom audience is a lookalike audience.

While custom audiences help you get more from existing customers or fans, lookalike audiences are brilliant at increasing your reach, and bringing in new customers.

A lookalike audience uses Facebook’s software to reach people similar to those in your custom audience. This almost always works better than trying to come up with the right demographics, interests and behaviors to target by yourself. Lookalike audiences can result in cost reductions as much as 1/10th the cost of regular cold targeting.

To create a lookalike, just set your custom audience (for example, people who made a purchase from your store), then use that as a base for your lookalike audience. You can choose how broad your lookalike audience should be, as well as layer interest/behavior/demographic targeting on top of the lookalike.

How to Set Up Your First Retargeting Ad

If you haven’t run any Facebook Ads before, setting it up the first time can be daunting. There’s a lot to learn. But it’s worth the investment, as Facebook Ads are vital for driving the traffic your store needs to thrive.

If you’re new, start small. Set up a simple retargeting ad. This is a good way to avoid heavy losses by targeting the wrong audiences, learn the Facebook Ads platform, and drive a nice bump in sales to your WooCommerce site.

Let’s walk through setting up your ad now.

Before You Start: Set Up Business Manager Account & Facebook Page

If you haven’t already, you’ll need some things in place before you start running Facebook Ads.

You’ll want to create a Facebook Business Manager account to manage your ads. Once you’ve got this set up, create an ad account for your business (you can have multiple ad accounts managed inside the same Business Manager account).

Go to business.facebook.com to get started.

You’ll also need a Facebook page for your store. Open the Facebook menu and go to Create > Page to set this up.

You don’t need to add too much to your Facebook page for now, but make sure it looks like your store is a real and trustworthy business.

Now we can move on to setting up your retargeting ad.

Step One: Set Up the Facebook Pixel

First, make sure your Pixel is installed, set up, and firing.

Follow the instructions we laid out earlier to set up the Pixel with Pixel Cat.

Then, make sure the WooCommerce integration is turned on, so you’re automatically tracking shopping events.

It’s best to set the Pixel up early, so it has time to gather data before you start running your ad. Otherwise, it may take a little while before your ads can start to be effective.

Once this is all set up, we can move on to setting up an ad.

Campaign

Now you’ll need to create a Campaign.

Go to Facebook Ads Manager > Campaigns > Create.

The first thing you’ll do when creating your campaign is to select a campaign objective. This is what the goal of your campaign is.

If your ad is meant to drive sales, select Conversions.

After choosing your campaign objective, name your campaign, leave all other settings as they are, and hit Next.

Ad Set

Next up is creating an Ad Set.

One campaign can have multiple ad sets. The ad set covers targeting, as well as settings like budget and placements.

So, if you wanted to test different audiences against each other, you’d test by creating several ad sets.

For this, we’ll just worry about making one ad set. Let’s run through the settings of your ad set.

For the Conversion Event Location, choose Website, as that’s where a conversion (ie a purchase) will take place.

The Budget & Schedule is up to you – choose a budget that you’re comfortable with spending.

The Audience is the most important part here. This is where you’ll choose the people you want to show ads to.

Select Create New Audience. Hit Create New > Custom Audience.

For the audience source, choose Website.

Hit Next.

Include All website visitors, using your Pixel as the source. If you want to refine it further, you could choose People who visited specific web pages, and restrict this to people who viewed product pages, or some other high-intent area of your site.

You can keep the Retention setting as 30 days, increase it, or decrease it, depending on how much traffic you get. This setting means how long people stay in your audience after performing the event. 30 days means you will target people who viewed your site in the last 30 days.

Now, hit Exclude People. Select the Events dropdown, and choose Purchase. 

Keep the retention setting the same.

Name the audience something recognizable, like “retargeting site visitors”, and hit Create Audience.

This will give you an audience of people who viewed your site in the last 30 days, but did not make a purchase in the last 30 days.

You can add more layers on top of that if you wish (such as only targeting men or women, restricting to an age group, or showing ads in certain locations or languages).

If this isn’t relevant, we can move on.

Keep placements as Automatic Placements.

Under Optimization & Delivery, you’ll want to optimize for Conversions.

If the Facbook Pixel doesn’t have enough data yet, you won’t be able to choose this. So you may need to start by optimizing for Landing Page Views.

Once you get some conversions for the Pixel to pick up on, you can edit your ad and change this.

Hit Next to move on.

Ad

The final step is creating your Ad.

One ad set can have many ads. It can also have just one.

You would create more than one ad if you want to test creative elements (such as images or copywriting) against each other, by creating different ads, served to the same audience.

You could also create multiple ads to drive traffic to different products in your WooCommerce store.

Setting up your ad is fairly straightforward. You just need to add media, write something to go with it, and select the destination for when someone clicks on your ad.

Let’s run through it quickly.

Under Identity, select your store’s Facebook page (you can also select an Instagram account, if you have one and want to run ads on Instagram too).

Under Ad Setup, keep it basic with Single Image or Video. Later you may want to experiment with carousel ads, though (this is something you can test with multiple ads).

Under Ad Creative, you’ll add your media and write your copy. Start with a simple single image – choose the best quality image of the product you want to promote.

Write some text to go with your ad. Keep this short and snappy, while conveying a few points that say why the person should buy your product.

For the Destination, select Website, and paste the URL of the product you are promoting.

Finally, choose a Call to Action for your ad. Shop Now should fit for most WooCommerce stores.

Take a look at your ad, double check the copywriting, and hit Publish to finish.

Next Steps

Once your ad is approved, it will start running in accordance with the budget and schedule you’ve set up.

This was a basic walkthrough on how to set up your first ad for your WooCommerce store. Going forward, you’ll want to test different audiences, different creative elements, and promote different products, to see what delivers the best results.

Testing takes a bit more of an investment, but it’s worth it, to increase the effectiveness of your ads.

Testing is the most reliable way to increase the amount of sales you get from your ads, and cut down the money you need to spend to get each sale.

Additionally, make sure you track the cost per conversion you’re getting from your ads. If you’re spending more money per sale than you’re actually making from the sale, you’ll need to change something, otherwise you’ll just lose money in the long run.

Your WooCommerce Facebook Pixel Guide: Summing Up

This has been the complete guide to installing the Facebook Pixel and utilizing Facebook for WooCommerce store owners.

Facebook Ads are a powerful tool for you to grow your WooCommerce store. It takes a bit of time to learn and master, but the platform is one of the best out there for generating new sales and customers.

Whether you’re about to start Facebook Ads now, or considering it in the future, it’s a good idea to get the Facebook Pixel installed and running on your site as soon as possible.

The sooner you get the Pixel installed, the more data it will be able to collect, and the more effective it will be once you decide to start running ads.

The Pixel can seem tricky to get your head around if you look at the code itself, but installing it and getting it set up is simple with a plugin like Pixel Cat.

Pixel Cat takes care of all the complicated code of the Facebook Pixel, so all you need to do is add your Pixel ID and set up which events to track. It takes just minutes to get the Pixel up and running on your WooCommerce site.

The post Facebook Pixel for WooCommerce: The Full Setup Guide appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

We’ve just released a big update – version 2.0 of Quiz Cat is live now. The new update comes with some frequently requested feature additions, that we’re super happy to ship.

The new update to Quiz Cat features a new quiz type – you can now create quizzes with weighted answers for more in-depth knowledge and trivia tests. We’ve also given you expanded design options, and overall given you the ability to make your quizzes’ appearance more modern and visually stimulating.

Here’s a run down of the new features added to Quiz Cat:

Weighted Answers

Weighted Answers quizzes are available on Quiz Cat Business and Quiz Cat Elite.

A much-requested feature, you can now create quizzes with weighted multiple choice answers.

There are three quiz types to choose from now – Multiple Choice (this is the classic “test” quiz type), Personality, and Weighted Answers.

A weighted quiz works like a regular multiple choice quiz would, on the quiz taker’s side. They’ll be given a selection of answers to choose from, and they choose which answer they believe to be correct.

The difference is, with this quiz type you can assign a number of points to each answer, instead of a simple right/wrong.

New Color Pickers

The new and improved Quiz Cat now has a dedicated “appearance” tab, with more options for you to customize the appearance of your awesome quiz.

Among these options are a bunch of new color pickers. You can quickly and easily customize the colors of your quiz font, answer boxes, buttons, and more.

Quiz Border, Answer Borders & Misc Design Improvements

Another design feature added is the border for your quiz, and your answer sections. In the appearance tab you can add a border to your quiz area, and customize the thickness, radius, and color of the border.

Same goes for your answer sections.

We’ve also added an improved hover animation for answers, to make your quizzes appear more modern and up to date.

Want to Try the New & Improved Quiz Cat?

Now’s the time for you to get Quiz Cat and try building fun, interactive quizzes on your site.

If you’re already a Quiz Cat user, contact us if you have any additional feature requests you’d like to see in future updates. New & existing users can also check out a demo of the new quiz type here.

Quiz Cat takes just a couple of minutes to set up. We promise you, Quiz Cat is the most user-friendly WordPress quiz plugin out there today.

The post Introducing Quiz Cat 2.0: Weighted Answers & Design Updates appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Pricing tables help your customers make informed buying decisions and give them the information they need to make a purchase right there, on your site.

If you fail to deliver enough information on your products/services’ pricing, customers are forced to go elsewhere to find such information. There they can easily be swayed to a product or service offered by another company, and you’ve lost a sale.

A great pricing table not only keeps customers on your site, but it can also push customers to a higher pricing tier, resulting in a more profitable sale than the customer originally planned to make. Replicate this for a large number of customers, and a bit of effort put into crafting your pricing table can result in a huge influx to your revenue.

It takes a bit of work to nail down the right pricing strategy. It takes even more work to create a pricing table from scratch that looks great and converts. That’s why you need a pricing table plugin for WordPress to do half the work for you.

This post will guide you through building a pricing table that converts, setting an effective pricing strategy, and introduce a few of the best pricing table plugins to use on your WordPress site.

[Click here to skip ahead to the best WordPress pricing table plugins]

Why You Need a Pricing Table

A WordPress pricing table serves multiple purposes. But at the end of the day, the number one thing you want to do is convert viewers into customers. 

The average conversion rate for e-commerce is around 1-2%. This means there will always be a significant amount of your site viewers who don’t convert into sales, and thus significant potential for you to improve your conversion rate and make more sales.

It’s likely to be a similar story whether you’re selling physical products, a service, a SaaS subscription, or anything else. The majority of the visitors to your WordPress site will not make a purchase.

Your job is to give the potential customer enough information about what you’re selling to make a purchase decision and to present that information in a way that’s easy to take in.

A lot of people will even go straight to your pricing page to see how much your product/service costs, especially if they have prior knowledge of your business.

You want to give these customers, who are already advanced in your sales funnel, the smoothest path to validate their decision and make a purchase. Making it hard for them to find out what your product costs creates unnecessary friction.

On top of this, a pricing table serves to passively up-sell customers to more expensive offerings. A comparison table, comparing different pricing tiers and different features in each tier, shows people what they’re missing if they only go for the cheapest option.

This is extremely valuable for maximizing your customers’ lifetime value. Instead of spending precious time and resources trying to convince people to upgrade after their initial purchase, a smart pricing table can convince them to spend more from the outset.

What happens when your pricing table is not good enough

A poor pricing table (or none at all) is driving your customers away. 

There’s a degree of doubt you need to get past when you’re selling things online. If you don’t do a good job of clearing up this doubt for your customers, one of two things will happen.

1. The customer is not confident enough to make a purchase and leaves without spending anything.
2. They go somewhere else to find more information about your pricing and what’s on offer. This usually ends up being a comparison post published by a third party, who recommends other tools, products, or services (not just yours).

Worst case scenario? The customer goes to search for more information and ends up on a comparison post from one of your competitors, where they’re convinced to buy from them and not from you.

On a lesser note, your customers may not be driven away by a lack of information. But if you haven’t optimized your pricing table (or pricing strategy) well enough, these conversions probably default to your cheapest products or services. 

But no matter which way you swing it, an online business without a well-made pricing table is leaking money.

Making Your Pricing Table Effective

An effective pricing table for your WordPress website should clearly communicate the information necessary to help your customers make a purchasing decision. It should also subtly push people to purchase your more expensive products or plans, without being too overt.

However, before worrying about the psychology of WordPress pricing tables and increasing your average sale, just make sure your pricing table is clear and easy to digest. The trick is to communicate enough information, but not too much that you trigger analysis paralysis in your customers.

It can be a temptation to list every single minute feature of each plan on your pricing table, to show customers how much they’re getting when they sign up. However, this often leads to a pricing table that is hard to follow. When scrolling down the list, you lose sight of which feature applies to which plan, and it’s hard for someone to quickly scan and assess. Many people today have low attention spans, so cater to that with a concise table.

You should try and stick to the most important information (pricing, billing terms) and the most significant features.

MeetEdgar’s pricing table is a good example of this. There are just a few features listed in the main table, with shared features listed below, in a way that makes the pricing page clean and uncluttered.

If you are going to list a large number of features in your table, a good way to approach it is separating the major details – plan name, price, a summary of each and a CTA button – with the comparison of individual features.

Moz does this well. If you want to compare all the small features of each plan (which is necessary with most SEO tools like this), you can click to a more detailed table. However, the pricing shown initially is clear and with few barriers for the customer.

Buffer does the same thing. Their pricing table is super condensed, just showing the most pertinent differences between each plan, and gives the user an option to see a more detailed feature comparison if they wish.

Psychology of Pricing Tables

Don’t you want more people to sign up for your more expensive plans or packages?

There are a couple of small psychological things you can implement in your pricing table to increase your average order value, and highlight more profitable options.

One basic piece of pricing psychology is “charm pricing” – instead of charging $10, charge $9.99. Almost every business uses this tactic. The actual difference is negligible, but in the customer’s mind, $9.99 is cheaper and better value.

Another common thing to see on pricing tables is a “featured” or “most popular” column. 

By doing this, you’re subconsciously pushing the customer towards this option via social proof, putting it in their mind that this is the best value plan.

You know what you’ll notice about these “featured” columns? They’re never the lowest plan. Highlighting your middle plan is an awesome way to encourage people to pay more than the minimum you have on offer.

But wait, don’t you want to push people towards your most expensive option? Not necessarily.

Another sneaky piece of pricing psychology is to add a premium-priced option, which exists mainly to bring down the perceived cost of your middle and lowest plans.

You might have 3 plans – $10, $20 and $30 for example. By introducing the $30 option, it makes the $20 one look cheaper in comparison, as opposed to if $10 and $20 were the only two choices.

If people sign on to the $30 plan, that’s amazing. But the main point of this plan is to make your 2nd tier look like it’s better value, and encourage more people to sign on to this than the lowest tier.

Learn more about how to price your products & services with the right strategy.

Features of the Best Pricing Table Plugins

Let’s look at what separates the best pricing table plugin for WordPress from the others.

These are some features you want to look at when shopping around for a pricing table plugin (of course, you can skip ahead to our advice as well). Some features may be more or less important to you, so use that to pick out the right plugin for your own use.

Pricing – Free or Premium

Hey, we’re talking about pricing, and it’s natural for this to be one of the main things to consider. If you’re on a budget, and you don’t require an extensive feature set, you might look for a free option. There are certainly a good number of free plugins available on WordPress.org – however, as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for, and as your business grows, you may want to invest in a premium option for an expanded feature set and better support.

Code Bloat (or lack thereof)

Slow load speed is the silent killer for websites. Often this is because you have too many complicated plugins with messy code slowing your site down.

This can be all the more damaging for a pricing table plugin. A table with flashy effects and animations is no use if shoppers are clicking away because the page takes too long to load. This is one of the pages on your site that load speed is the most important, so make sure your pricing table plugin goes along with this.

Design & Customization

Ideally, it should be straightforward to edit most of your pricing tables’ design. If you’re looking for a plugin, it means you either don’t have the ability or the time to build a custom-coded pricing table from scratch – or simply don’t see it as worth the investment.

You do, however, want to be able to customize your pricing tables to fit your site’s design, and ensure it looks appealing. So a plugin that is simple to customize (ideally without the need for code, too) is a must.

Fully responsive

Just as your WordPress site needs to cater to mobile and desktop users, so does your pricing page. The standard way rows and columns are laid out horizontally doesn’t lend itself to mobile users, and there’s nothing worse (and nothing easier to fix) than driving mobile users away because your site doesn’t work properly.

Your pricing table plugin should cater to these mobile users with a design that switches up and is responsive depending on device and screen size.

Templates

Along with the ability to tweak design to fit your site, you want a few pre-set templates to start with. This will drastically cut down the time it takes to get your pricing table up and running. A plus if it has templates for different styles of pricing tables, such as comparison tables.

Integrations

Look for an easy integration with your payment gateway. If your flow has unnecessary clicks for your customer to complete their signup/payment, you’re introducing more opportunities for people to drop off. Linking the buttons on your pricing table directly to your payment gateway is a great way to reduce friction.

Also look for integrations with analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and the Facebook Pixel. This will make your audience building and retargeting campaign a lot smoother.

Custom CSS/HTML Functionality

While the best pricing table plugins should make it easy to build a table without code, you still want the ability to customize with CSS or HTML, should the need arise. There may be tiny customizations you want to make, or small conflicts with your theme or other plugins that require an easy fix with a line or two of custom code. Sometimes all you need is a small code snippet to adjust your table’s columns and rows to fit your content.

If this comes up, it’s important that you, your developer, or the plugin’s support team can easily add the code necessary to make your pricing table perfect.

Advanced Add-Ons

While gaudy animations and flashing neon lights are unnecessary for a professional pricing table, there are some advanced features that may make a lot of difference for you.

A pricing toggle, for example, to allow your customers to switch between monthly/yearly pricing, or different currencies. Tooltips (a graphic that shows up with more information when a customer hovers over an element) can also be a very useful feature to have on your pricing table. Easy integration with WordPress page builder tools like Elementor is another nice extra for many site owners.

The Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins

Ready to start earning more revenue with a high-converting, professional pricing table for WordPress? We’ve got you covered.

To make it easy for you, here are the best WordPress pricing table plugins you can get today.

1 – Easy Pricing Tables

The first-ever WordPress plugin that Fatcat Apps built was Easy Pricing Tables – and it’s still going strong today as the best pricing table plugin for WordPress. More than 500,000 users have downloaded the free version on WordPress.org, and many more have made use of the powerful features in Easy Pricing Tables premium.

Easy Pricing Tables is designed to make it super simple to add clean, conversion-optimized pricing tables to your WordPress website. It takes a few minutes to set up a table, by just choosing a template and filling in your plan or product details for each column.

The plugin features 10 professionally-designed table templates (including 3 comparison tables), with most elements customizable in the plugin’s back end. Everything else (such as minor changes to columns and rows) is further customizable with HTML and CSS.

Despite a focus on simplicity, it doesn’t skimp on additional features. The plugin includes tooltips and pricing toggle functionality, as well as smooth integrations with Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads.

Best of all, Easy Pricing Tables is clean and optimized for a fast site. You can add pricing tables seamlessly to your post, using a Gutenberg block. Alternatively, you can use a shortcode to add your pricing table to a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder.

You can try the lite version of the plugin for free on WordPress.org, or get a pro license for access to the features that really move the needle.

2 – Responsive Pricing Table

Responsive Pricing Table is another easy to use WordPress plugin that lets you build a table with minimal fuss and effort.

You build your table by filling out the details for each of your pricing plans, including the title, a short description, price, billing frequency, and a list of features. Then add the URL for your button (or a code snippet to connect it with Stripe/PayPal), and away you go.

The free version has limited design options (you can customize the color styling for each column, which affects the button and subtitle text), however with the premium version you get access to additional design layouts (as well as tooltip support).

Some people may be looking for a little bit more customization from their pricing table plugin, but for a super quick and easy to use option, Responsive Pricing Table fits the bill.

3 – ARPrice

ARPrice is a more powerful WordPress plugin for those who want a little bit more flexibility to customize their design, and make a great-looking table.

The free version has several pre-made templates to choose from, while ARPrice pro has over 300 sample templates you can download and use as a starting point.

It also lets you customize every little part about your pricing tables’ design via their point and click editor. Included in the design editor are 3000+ icons, 900 Google fonts, and unlimited color options.

The premium version comes with advanced features like tooltips, image/media uploads, A/B testing, button styles and hover effects.

This plugin takes a little bit more work to get going than the previous two, however, it’s a good option for people who want to dive deep into customizing their table.

4 – Pricing Table by Supsystic

Pricing Table by Supsystic is another plugin that offers deep customization and feature sets. The free version has 7 templates available, while the pro version has 38 more – all of which can be customized with a drag-and-drop editor.

The plugin also comes packed with advanced features like hover animations, pricing toggles and the ability to import/export tables.

The editor is fully responsive and makes it easy to see how your changes come out on your pricing table.

It has a bit more of a learning curve than some plugins, so if you want a super simple option to build pricing tables in just a few minutes, something like Easy Pricing Tables is a better option. But this plugin is a fine option for those who need deep design flexibility.

5 – CSS3 Responsive WordPress Compare Pricing Tables

This plugin uses CSS3 and HTML code to generate clean pricing tables or comparison tables that won’t slow your site down.

While the back end interface looks a little dated, and takes a little while to figure out, it’s ultimately a very simple way to set up a multi-column pricing table that looks great.

The pricing tables support any HTML code, which you can use to add images and other media into your rows and columns.

2 table styles are available, along with 20 color sets. You can further customize your table’s design with things like featured columns, banners and hover effects.

6 – Pricing Table by PickPlugins

PickPlugins Pricing Tables is a newer entrant in the game, having only been around a couple of years. Regardless, it’s a decent WordPress plugin, with a free and paid version, that makes it pretty easy to add a pricing table to your site.

The plugin features 25 different themes, which are quite a departure from the styles commonly seen from other plugins on this list. These pricing tables have a very minimalist look, which may suit your business better than something more modern and colorful. You can further customize this look with video embeds, background images, Google fonts, and more.

You can spice up your pricing tables with banners and featured columns, and it has a responsive slider feature to work well on mobile.

7 – WRC Pricing Tables

WRC Pricing Tables is a WordPress pricing table plugin for people who want extensive customization options. It lets you set up every little part of your table, including adding tooltips and hover effects. The back end takes a little while to set up, but the payoff is a lot of freedom in how you build your pricing table.

It supports images and videos in the table, including images as the column background (see image below), which is a nice feature.

8 – WP Table Builder

WP Table Builder offers a slightly different solution, for anyone who wants to build something a little different to your standard pricing table.

While you don’t have any table templates to start with, this plugin features a drag and drop builder which lets you get very deep into customizing your table just how you want it. It’s a great solution for comparison tables, particularly for affiliate sites.

Since you have to build a table from scratch, WP Table Builder takes a fair bit longer to set up than a plugin like Easy Pricing Tables does. The payoff, however, is complete freedom to create the table you want.

9 – Go Pricing

Go Pricing is an advanced tool, designed to help you build and deploy unique pricing tables. The visual editor in the back end is quite intuitive and offers a lot of flexibility for designing your columns & layout.

You can start out with one of their 250 demo tables, and customize the design further to fit your pricing page.

Another nice feature is compatibility with Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, and Elementor, making it a great option for users of these page builder tools.

In Summary

There are many factors to consider when choosing the best WordPress pricing table plugin. Design, integrations, templates, and extra add-ons such as tooltips and animations.

The list above is a comprehensive list of the best WordPress plugins available today, free and paid. Check out our recommendations to start building effective pricing tables for your WordPress site today.

The post The 9 Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins in 2020 (Ranked & Reviewed) appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

It’s nearly impossible to figure out what the optimal price is, and there’s no objective way to conclusively measure it either.

Yet, setting the right price is crucially important for your business. Price optimization is one of the easiest and highest ROI business activities you can engage in.

The sad truth is that most business owners have set their prices with no good underlying rationale. They’ve set their prices at random or blindly copied them from a competitor, and often don’t review their pricing for years on end. Often, they grossly undervalue what their products and services are really worth to their customers, leaving easy money on the table.

By sitting down, thinking about, testing and optimizing your pricing, you can drastically boost your bottom line. By changing a few numbers, you can not only grow your revenue, but also your profits – without doing any extra work.

Are You Using The Right Pricing Strategy?

Not only do many business owners charge a wrong (or suboptimal) price, many of them don’t even use the right pricing strategy to begin with!

The most popular pricing methods you come across online essentially fall under two main pricing strategies:

1. Cost-plus pricing: you calculate your cost, add a profit margin on top, and that’s the price you charge.
2. Value-based pricing: you estimate the value your customers get out of using your products or services, and charge a portion of that value.

Most business owners start out using cost-plus pricing and never look back. They never even bother to experiment or change it.

While that makes sense for some businesses, it certainly isn’t the best strategy to follow for everyone.

Cost-Plus Pricing Is Simple

Cost-plus pricing is most commonly used because it’s so straightforward: you make a product, calculate how much it costs you to make that product, add a profit margin on top of it and sell it.

For example, if you provide webhosting, you can calculate exactly how much it costs to run your servers and provide your service.

Let’s say it costs you $10 per month for the serverspace and other tools required for one customer. You’d like to make a 25% profit margin on it, so you’ll charge $12.50 per month.

Because it’s so obvious, cost-plus pricing is the most commonly used form of pricing, especially by new business owners.

Although cost-plus pricing is a great fit for some businesses, it certainly isn’t the best one for all of them. Cost-plus pricing has some very significant downsides.

The Problems With Cost-Plus Pricing

1. You might come across additional costs.

Often, your estimated production costs turn out to be incorrect. As any business owner knows, unexpected costs will materialize out of nowhere, and everything turns out to be more expensive than you’ve initially planned.

When you’re operating on a tight profit margin (as is often the case with most cost-plus pricing methods), these additional costs eat directly into your profit margins.

2. It’s a race to the bottom.

Cost-plus based pricing is inherently driven by a mindset where you’re competing on price – not on quality, value, speed or any other differentiator. This line of thinking will often result in a race to the bottom with your competitors.

You undercut your competitors, slightly dropping your profit margin. Another competitor does the same. You undercut them again, lowering your profit margin once again. Eventually, profit margins evaporate, and you will need to cut costs and lower quality to still be competitive. Competing on price should be a last resort, not your first.

3. Customers are not as price-sensitive than you think.

While competing on cost can make a lot of sense if you’re selling a basic raw commodity like oil or salt, odds are that you aren’t.

What you’re selling online usually has more ways to be differentiated on than price alone. And if that’s the case, it’s likely that your customers aren’t all that price sensitive to begin with.

Particularly in B2B settings, customers just don’t care about price as much as you think. What really matters about a tool or service is that it gets the job done, is easy to use, fits within their workflow and as an afterthought, isn’t too expensive.

But lowering or raising your price a few dollars will not attract any of these potential customers, or turn them away either. Your attempts at lowering your price might only lower your profit margin, without attracting additional customers.

4. You might leave massive amounts of money on the table.

Most importantly: cost-based pricing often leaves a lot of money on the table.

Most people believe that getting more customers is better, but this isn’t always the case. Remember, as a business owner, you should focus on increasing your total revenue and profitability.

And increasing your sheer number of customers isn’t always the best way to reach that goal. More customers isn’t always better.

Let’s say you build an online tool, and the net cost for each additional customer you sell it to is $5, max. So, using cost-plus pricing, you decide to sell it for $10 – a nice, whopping 50% profit margin.

If you get 600 sales per month, that’s $6000 in revenue, and $3000 in profit every single month.

Now, let’s say you raise the price to $40, and you see your sales numbers plummet to 150 per month. You might not have as many customers as you had before, but you still have a revenue of $6000 per month, and have just increased your profit to $5250!

Additionally, you have now increased your profit margin from 50% to 87.50%, meaning you can now spend more money marketing your business to acquire new customers.

This example isn’t that uncommon. Many businesses who have chosen their prices arbitrarily based on cost can see huge gains just by optimizing their pricing.

What Really Matters Is The Value You Provide

The alternative to cost-plus pricing is value-based pricing. For many online businesses, it’s a complete gamechanger.

The biggest problem with cost-plus pricing is that you’re leaving easy money on the table. You only receive the amount of money you thought was reasonable to charge, not the amount of money they gladly would’ve paid for your products if if only you would’ve had the guts to ask them for it.

Value-based pricing sets the price based on the value your customer receives from your products or services.

Ultimately, any good business owner or marketer should always look at their offerings from their customers’ perspective.

What do your customers want? How can it help them improve their lives? And most importantly – how much value do they get out of it, and how much are they willing to pay for it?

Everything you do as a business owner is about creating value for your customer. And there’s no shame in charging a portion of the value you create for them in return. Your customers will be more than willing to pay it, since they receive more value out of it themselves.

How Value-Based Pricing Can Boost Your Profitability

Say you’ve created a software tool that costs you $10 to provide to each customer, but saves the business owner you sell it to $500 per month. Using cost plus pricing, you’d charge a mere $20. Using value-based pricing, you could charge $100, and it would still be a no-brainer for your customers, since they still make a $400 profit.

As long as you deliver a positive return on investment, your customers will gladly pay a lot more than your costs of goods sold.

Bottom line: if you’re reading this (and are selling something online), you should probably use value-based pricing.

Differentiate what you offer on value, not price.

Ultimately, your customers only care about how much value you provide them with. Not only is a value-based pricing strategy more lucrative for you, it’s also more in line with what your customer truly wants. When you charge more, you can invest more money in creating higher quality tools, products or services that would provide more value to your customers.

Step one to optimize your pricing is to start using a value based pricing strategy.

Step Two: Pick Your Pricing Method

Now that you know how you’ll calculate the height of your prices, you need to decide how you’ll actually charge them.

You can choose different billing models, that sometimes overlap.

Here are the three most common ones:

One-Time Purchase

The most straightforward billing model is the one-time purchase.

Your customers pay the full fee for your product or service in one transaction – whether it’s beforehand or afterwards. You can charge by the hour, by the project or have a set price. What matters is that it’s a one-time transaction you need to sell once.

Examples:

• Selling a book on Amazon.
• Designing a website.

Advantages:

• Customers are used to this billing model, and often expect it.
• Customers are not suspicious about it at all, because it’s the norm.
• That makes it easier to sell.

Disadvantages:

• You only make money on each sale once.
• For any followup sales, you need to get in touch with your customer again, and persuade them to buy your product or service again.
• As a result of that, you might leave a lot of money on the table.

Subscription Model

One of the most interesting billing models is the subscription or recurring model.

You sell your product or service once, and your customer agrees to keep receiving and paying for it multiple times. This can either be for a set number of times, or continue on indefinitely.

Examples:

• A gym membership
• An online SaaS tool like Zapier.

Advantages:

• You only have to persuade your customers to buy your product or service once, and you get paid many times.
• Customers might keep a subscription going for a long time because they are used to it, forget about it, or think they’ll use it again soon, earning you a steady ongoing paycheck with low costs.
• If you can pull it off, a subscription model is one of the best billing models you can use.

Disadvantages:

• Disadvantages
• You need to have a business model that provides value on an ongoing basis – for months or years.
• It can be difficult to make it work.

Commission Or Usage Based

Another commonly used billing model is based on commission or usage.

Instead of charging a flat fee, you calculate how much people actually use your tools or services, or how much revenue it generates them and charge based off of that.

By definition this model is usually value-based.

Examples:

• A mailing provider (like Mailchimp) that charges you based on how many emails you send.
• PayPal that charges you a fee on each transaction you send or receive.
• Affiliates that charge a commission for each of your products they sell for you.

Advantages:

• It’s extremely fair: people pay exactly for what they use or how much value they get out of it.
• You’re guaranteed to be paid fairly and can calculate a profit margin in a very straightforward manner.
• It’s a win-win situation for both parties, because you provide value to users, and only charge a portion of that.
• It’s likely to be an ongoing, profitable collaboration because you both benefit from it.

Disadvantages:

• It can be very hard to actually measure the usage or revenue accurately.
• Most businesses don’t have the control to track and implement this.

Which Pricing And Billing Methods Are Right For You?

It’s not easy to decide which pricing and billing methods are right for you.

There’s no objectively best type of pricing or billing that works for every type of business. It all depends on your specific situation.

Some things to consider when deciding which strategies are right to use are:

• What is your product or service offering?
• How much value are you actually delivering to your customers? (Are you offering a commodity, or a clearly differentiated product or service?)
• What’s the norm in the industry, and what are your competitors doing?
• What fits your personality, your company and your culture?
• What fits your branding and your marketing?

Whatever your situation is, know that you have multiple types of pricing and billing that you can choose from.

There’s no one-size fits all, but in most cases, you’re not resigned to one specific type of pricing either.

Many industries previously thought to be set in stone have been disrupted and reinvented by smart newcomers with a new pricing model.

You too could try out different pricing options and see which one works best for your business.

Pricing Tables Made Easy

Once you’ve set your prices, you need to display them on your website. If you’re running a WordPress website, the easiest way to do that is with our Easy Pricing Tables plugin.

The design of your pricing page has a huge impact on your online sales. But creating a pricing table that looks good AND converts on your own can be very hard.

Easy Pricing Tables for WordPress makes this super easy. Create a gorgeous pricing table that sells, and connect it to your favorite shopping cart service in just a few simple steps. You’ll get a fully customizable, mobile responsive pricing table that looks great on all devices.

Check It Out Here

The post How To Price Your Products Or Services: The Most Common Pricing Methods You Can Choose From appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

An email list is one of the most valuable things you can build for your online business. To build an email list for your WordPress website, you need a powerful WordPress email opt-in plugin.

The best opt-in plugin for your WordPress site is going to make building a list and growing your website or blog a lot easier, helping you convert more of your hard-earned visitors into leads or loyal readers.

Read on for the best list building plugins for WordPress available today.

Why You Need an Optin Plugin for Your WordPress Site

An email list is essential if you want to grow an online business. Whether your hustle is a blog, an online store, a SaaS product, or anything else, it pays to have an audience, and a way to contact them.

Once you have a list, you can nurture these people to go from readers to buyers, set up referral programs to further grow your audience, use emails to build social media audiences, ask for reviews and testimonials, and much much more.

It’s one of the reasons email marketing has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent.

Even if you don’t plan to do any email marketing right now, it pays to start growing your list as soon as you have people coming to your website. That way, when you want to start running email marketing campaigns, you have the list, right there ready to go.

Oh, and an email list also increases the value of your business, should you ever want to sell.

To start building your email list, you need a way for your site visitors to sign up to your list. Very few people are going to jump through hoops to find your contact details and ask “can I join your newsletter” (unless your content is really just that good).

Even a simple popup or opt-in form on your site, easily visible, saying “sign up to our newsletter” is a start. 

If you want to get deeper into the game and build your list quicker, you’ll want to start using a variety of different opt-in forms, as well as providing incentives for people to subscribe and using advanced triggers to hit people with personalized opt-ins.

This is where an opt-in form plugin is essential. You need something that has the power you need to maximize the rate you grow your list, before too many viewers leave and never find your website again.

Different Types of Optin Forms

It’s a good idea to use a variety of different opt-in forms on your site, to capture the highest number of visitors to your list as possible. But be careful not to make the number of opt-ins overwhelming.

Your site should be content first – it’s a pretty poor user experience if your site is just a neverending mess of popups and forms, which will translate into fewer visitors.

Here are some different form types and when to use them:

Popup

The classic popup. Done poorly, it’s annoying and will drive people away. But done right, popups are a great way to build your list.

Popups are effective because they’re almost impossible to ignore. Combine that with a stellar reason to subscribe, and a single popup can net a huge increase to your email list.

Just make sure to take the customer experience into account when creating a popup. Use advanced triggers to show it at the right time, and don’t overdo it with popup after popup after popup.

Inline postbox

An inline opt-in form (above, below, or in the middle of your content) is a nice low-friction way to convert site visitors into subscribers. The idea is to combine an opt-in form with great content or a killer lead magnet, to convince people they’ll get value out of signing up.

Inline opt-in forms are not as annoying as a popup or slide in, but this also means it’s not as easy to capture a reader’s attention. So you need to make sure your design stands out, as well as your messaging. A simple “sign up for our newsletter” will only work out if you have truly amazing content. A better idea is to use a lead magnet here – offer visitors additional content for free (related to the content of the page) when they sign up on the opt-in form.

Sidebar optin

Another classic opt-in form is the sidebar opt-in. Like an inline opt-in, this is an unobtrusive, low-friction opt-in form, and a must if your site has a sidebar. It’s unlikely to be super high-converting, but that’s made up for by the fact that your opt-in form is going to be seen by just about every visitor to your site.

Optin bar

Opt-in bars are a step up from inline forms and sidebar opt-ins in terms of catching the eye. A bar at the top of your site, on all your pages, can be a little distracting, but it also captures attention really well. 

Slide-in

A slide-in is like a popup, but less annoying. It’s a good mix of attention-grabbing and keeping your customer experience intact. The opt-in form slides in on the left or right side of the page (usually at the bottom), often with customizable triggers such as page scroll % or time on page before it appears.

Exit intent popup

Exit intent, or exit intervention popups help you capture website viewers who otherwise would have closed your page and never returned.

These popups appear when the viewer takes their mouse cursor outside the browser window as if they are about to close the tab/window. You can use this opportunity to offer a lead magnet or a pitch for something for the viewer to read later if they enter their email.

The 7 Best Optin Plugins for WordPress in 2020

To quickly and easily add any of these kinds of optin forms to your site, you need a powerful WordPress plugin.

Here are 7 popular WordPress list-building plugins out there to do that job for you.

Optin Cat

Optin Cat (our product, which we’re super proud of!) is the best low-cost, lightweight plugin to use to grow your email list.

Optin Cat is made by people who make a living building WordPress websites, so we know what site builders need in an opt-in plugin. You need a plugin with maximum functionality for minimal fuss, which is what Optin Cat is.

All common opt-in form types are super simple to build with Optin Cat – from your popups, inline and sidebar forms, to highly targeted slide-ins, exit intent popups and 2-step optins. Advanced triggering options help you show your opt-in forms to the right people, at the right time.

The best thing about Optin Cat is that it’s easy to use, and lightweight. A lot of opt-in and popup tools slow your site down, and take an age to set up. Site speed and productivity are both vital for site builders, and Optin Cat doesn’t get in your way with either of these two things.

This plugin integrates with a range of popular email marketing tools too, with advanced features for segmenting your list, such as tags and merge fields.

The premium version of Optin Cat is both an affordable and powerful way to start building your email list. If you want a stripped-down version, there are free options available for MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, and Mad Mimi.

Bloom

Bloom, from Elegant Themes, is a powerful opt-in plugin, which lets you create great-looking popups, slide-ins, inline opt-in forms, sidebar opt-ins and more. It comes together with a subscription to Elegant Themes’ other tools, including the Divi page builder.

Bloom forms come with hundreds of design templates, as well as providing the flexibility to customize just about anything about the design yourself.

The targeting options are also top-notch. You’ve got options such as scroll %, time on page and time on site, as well as advanced triggers such as trigger after commenting, after purchasing, on a click, or after a period of inactivity.

It also gives you A/B testing between different designs from the Bloom dashboard.

Bloom does have a bit of a bigger learning curve than a few of the other plugins on this list, which goes hand in hand with a little more power and design flexibility.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is another powerful WordPress opt-in tool, much like Bloom, offering a lot of functionality, with the payoff of a slightly longer learning curve. 

Coming as part of the Thrive Membership, or as a standalone plugin, Thrive Leads allows you to create the following type of forms:

• In-line/in-content
• Lightbox (popup)
• Post footer
• Ribbon (opt-in bar)
• Screen filler
• Scroll mat
• Slide-in
• Sidebar widget

All their forms come with a range of design templates, as well as pretty deep design flexibility.

Thrive Leads offers the triggering options you’d expect from a premium opt-in plugin, such as scroll % and time on page, as well as showing opt-ins just on specific pages, posts and pages, specific categories, etc.

It also comes with extensive A/B testing options. Unlike Bloom, which only lets you test different designs, with Thrive Leads you can test different form types, triggers, and more. Basically, you have full control – if you’re serious about testing everything, you can do this with Thrive Leads.

Popup by Supsystic

If you’re specifically looking to build popups, this plugin is a great way to go. As the name suggests, it specializes in popups, rather than other types of opt-ins like inline or sidebar forms.

The form types you can build with the Popup plugin are pretty damn extensive. They range from your standard email opt-in form or contact forms, to social buttons, popups with video, PDF or iFrame embeds, slide-in lightboxes or notification bars, login screens and age verification screens.

The triggers available are very advanced, including exit intent, inactivity triggers, display after purchase, display after comment, and more. You can also lock content until the user takes an action on the popup, such as verifying their age, signing in, or opting in via email.

This plugin doesn’t have the all-round functionality of others on this list. However, it pays sometimes to specialize, so if you specifically want to build popup opt-in forms, this is one for you.

Convert Pro

Convert Pro – from the same people that make Ultimate Add-ons for Elementor, Ultimate Add-ons for Beaver Builder, and the Astra theme, is a premium and powerful email opt-in plugin.

It gives you a lot of the power of SaaS solutions like OptinMonster and Sumo, but operates as a plugin. This allows you the convenience of being able to set everything up within the WordPress dashboard, and reduces the drain on your site speed (a common problem when using SaaS tools with WordPress).

With Convert Pro you can build popups, slide-ins, info/opt-in bars, inline/after-post opt-in forms, widget & sidebar optins, and full-screen popups. All these form types come with a range of pre-made templates, which can be further customized with a drag and drop design editor.

You’ve also got a range of advanced triggering options such as:

• Specific posts and pages
• Exit intent
• Time on site/page
• User inactivity
• After scroll
• Welcome trigger
• After content

It also comes with the ability to A/B test different designs against one another.

If you need a premium opt-in plugin, without the code bloat of SaaS products, Convert Pro is a great choice.

Icegram

Icegram is a multi-purpose tool that offers all common opt-in form types, plus additional functionality beyond just optins.

As well as building opt-in forms like popups, header/footer bars, inline forms and sidebar optins, you can use Icegram to create call-to-action sections, which drive customers to a page or action of your choice.

For example, instead of a popup that just asks people to opt in to your list, you can create a popup (or sidebar widget, notification bar, etc) that directs people to your shop, or to your latest post.

It’s a great use for online stores, to help promote when you’re running a sale, or to capitalize on abandoned carts.

Icegram of course has all the functionality you want as an email plugin for WordPress, which is why it’s on this list. Its range of design templates and triggering options make it a great plugin to use to build your email list.

Hustle

Hustle, by WPMU Dev, is a powerful email opt-in plugin for WordPress. With Hustle you can build high-converting opt-in forms with flexible targeting options – from exit intent, to returning/new visitors, to visitors from specific countries or referrers. You can customize this to the extent necessary to capture visitors at the right place and time.

Hustle also lets you add social icons and share bars to your site, helping you grow a following beyond just email.

The plugin makes it easy to add inline forms to WordPress posts, using either the classic editor or Gutenberg blocks. It also offers ReCAPTCHA spam protection, adblock detection, analytics, and a wide range of email provider integrations.

Hustle has a free version available, offering a limited number of opt-ins, while to get everything Hustle Pro has to offer, you’ll need to sign up for a WPMU Dev membership at $49/month.

SaaS Tools

As an alternative to a basic WordPress plugin, you can also use SaaS (software as a service) tools to create optin forms and build your list.

The difference between a SaaS tool and a WordPress plugin is, instead of setting everything up within WordPress, you log in to a separate app to create and manage your optin forms. You’ll add forms to your website either by adding code or using another plugin to integrate with the tool.

SaaS apps usually offer a lot of powerful features, since they aren’t restricted by what you can do within WordPress. However, it’s also more common for these tools to slow your site down, because of how they need to communicate between your website and their own servers.

They can also be expensive – often charging a monthly fee, as opposed to many WordPress plugins which just have one yearly license payment.

Two of the most popular SaaS tools for lead generation and list building are OptinMonster and Sumo. Both tools have an extensive feature list, such as high-level targeting options, great-looking templates and customizable design. These tools can be a great way to build your list, but some will prefer the convenience of tools made specifically for WordPress.

How to Choose the Best Optin Plugin for Your WordPress Website

We’ve given you some recommendations above based on experience, but what’s best for one may not be the best for another. If you want to go and shop for the best WordPress optin plugin yourself, here are some key things to look out for.

Form Types

See what kind of opt-in forms the plugin supports. You likely already have an idea in mind for the type of opt-in form you want to build – an inline postbox, or a sidebar opt-in for example. Some plugins only have a few different form types, so make sure the one you want is in there.

More choices is often better – even if you only want one type of form to start with, a larger range of options will give you the flexibility to try out different forms in the future. However, if you are sure you only need one type, you may choose to go with a plugin that specializes in that type of form.

Triggering Options

Opt-in forms can become really powerful when you have the ability to hit the right people at the right time. Highly targeted forms have a much higher conversion rate, naturally. You want to have the flexibility to target users with specific forms based on the content they’re reading, as well as powerful targeting options like exit intent.

Another plus is being able to exclude users – for example, excluding specific pages or categories from being shown your forms, only showing forms to each user once, or only on desktop, to prevent potential negative user experience.

Email Provider Integrations

While most opt-in plugins store your subscribers locally within WordPress, it’s a huge plus to be able to automatically sync the emails you collect with your email marketing tool. Not only does automating this save valuable time spent downloading and uploading CSVs, it also allows you to segment users as they sign up, which can prove incredibly powerful for your email marketing efforts.

For example, you can send a tag, along with name and email, when someone signs up, referring to where they signed up from (which page, category or opt-in form, for example). This lets you add them to a personalized email sequence afterwards, delivering content directly related to their interests.

When you’re shopping for WordPress opt-in plugins, look for a couple of things – first, an integration with the email marketing tool your business/blog uses. Even better if it supports many popular email marketing tools, in case you need to use it for another project, or switch email providers.

Second, look for advanced integration capabilities, such as tags or merge fields. This will make it a lot easier to start extracting value from your email list, by crafting better email marketing campaigns.

Ease of Use

With more advanced features often comes a more extensive learning curve. This can easily be counter-intuitive, leading to you spending far too much time setting up what should be simple opt-in forms.

While there is sometimes a benefit to extensively testing and optimizing your forms, most of the time – particularly in the case of a simple sidebar opt-in or inline postbox – you’re better off building something clean and operational, quickly. That’s why your opt-in plugin should, too, be clean and easy to use. Freeing up your important time to work on tasks that have a higher ROI.

Speed

Finally, a point that is often overlooked, is speed – particularly, how your opt-in forms affect site speed. Many WordPress plugins come with a big downside. They slow your site down, which can end up doing more harm than good.

Page speed is a ranking signal for Google SEO, and may become an even bigger factor with Google’s new Core Web Vitals metric.

Outside of SEO, slow page speed is likely to hurt conversions and time on site from your users, as people are going to be quick to click away if pages are taking forever to load.

One of the most common causes of slow page speed is having 1000s of bloated, inefficient plugins working on your site. While the right plugins can add a lot of value, try to stay away from those that slow your site down – especially with opt-in forms that may be showing on each one of your pages. The best WordPress plugins will give you a range of functionality without draining too many resources.

Best Optin Plugins for WordPress – In Summary

Summing up, building an email list is a super important part of growing your WordPress site. And to start building your list you need to add opt-in forms in places your users are going to see them.

The list above introduces a collection of the best WordPress plugins you can use to start building your list today. My recommendation for the best opt-in plugin, with the best combination of power and simplicity, is Optin Cat. If you need to add clean, high-converting forms or pop ups to your WordPress site in minutes (without unnecessary bells, whistles or code bloat), Optin Cat is the tool for you.

The post 7 Best WordPress Optin Plugins in 2020 appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Whether you’re a technically-minded site owner or not, it’s easy to add the Facebook Pixel to your WordPress website.

The Facebook Pixel is a vital analytics tool for almost any online business. It helps you track actions taken from your site visitors, create custom audiences, and is a must if you are running, or ever plan to run Facebook Ads.

Read through this brief Facebook Pixel WordPress installation guide and start leveling up your analytics and retargeting game with Facebook Pixel tracking code.

What is the Facebook Pixel, and What Does it Do?

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that collects data and tracks events on your website, sending this data back to your Facebook business account. Data collected with the Facebook Pixel can be used to track conversions from Facebook Ads, optimize ad delivery for desired events, create custom audiences, and run retargeting ads.

That was a lot, so let’s simplify it with a couple of examples.

Example #1 – Conversion Tracking

First, say you’re running a Facebook Ad to your online store. Let’s say it’s a simple Facebook Ad > Pricing Page setup, in which the goal of the Facebook Ad is to make sales.

In this case, the Facebook Pixel will provide Facebook Ads Manager the data on who purchased your product after clicking to your site from the ad. This lets you:

1. View data on your ad’s conversion rate in Ads Manager, and assess your ad’s performance accordingly
2. automatically optimize your ads for your intended conversion event (purchase), showing ads to the type of person statistically most likely to perform this event.

Without the Facebook Pixel installed, you’re left to guesswork when judging how many sales came directly from your ad campaign, and your ads most likely won’t get as good an ROI, as they’ll be served to less optimized audiences.

Example #2 – Facebook Retargeting

A second example: you want to set up a Facebook Ads campaign targeting people who visited your pricing page, but didn’t buy, to offer a discount code.

With the Facebook Pixel embedded and set up on this page, you can create a Facebook audience of just these people. This is not something that can be done without the Pixel.

Even better, you can automatically create custom audiences of people who triggered this event, and have an ongoing Facebook ad campaign that retargets pricing page visitors (who didn’t actually buy).

This is a common way businesses use the Facebook Pixel to create super high-level custom audiences. Another way would be to use the Pixel to create an audience of people who viewed a specific page on your site, and show retargeting ads to them on that specific topic.

Example #3 – Custom Events for Analytics

One more example of the Facebook Pixel in action. You can use the Pixel to track very specific actions on your site, whether you want to create audiences and show ads to these people or not.

Let’s say you made changes to a landing page. You want to see how many people viewing this page clicked on one particular call to action on your landing page. You can create a custom event with the Pixel for people who click on a certain element (the section you want to track). You can then compare it against page views, or other custom events (say other elements on the page).

Using the Pixel as a (free!) analytics tool puts you on the fast track to a fully optimized WordPress site.

Facebook Pixel Standard Events

Here are the standard events you can track with the Facebook Pixel:

• Add payment info – someone enters their payment information (i.e. credit card info) into a payment form on your site.
• Add to cart – someone adds a product to their cart.
• Add to wishlist – someone adds a product to their wishlist.
• Complete registration – someone fills out a registration form (for example, an email optin or user registration).
• Contact – someone gets in touch with you via email, phone, SMS etc
• Customize product – someone uses a function on your site to create a custom version of a product.
• Donate – someone donates to your organization/cause.
• Find location – someone searches for your business’ physical location (e.g. through a Google Maps widget on your site).
• Initiate checkout – someone starts the checkout process on your site.
• Lead – someone submits info or takes an action that identifies themselves as a lead to you.
• Purchase – someone makes a purchase on your site.
• Schedule – someone books an appointment on your site.
• Search – someone uses the search function on your site.
• Start trial – someone starts a free trial offered on your site.
• Submit application – someone completes an application process for a product, service or program offered on your site.
• Subscribe – someone starts a subscription service on your site.
• View Content – someone visits a specific URL.

In addition to this, you can create custom events, if you want to track something outside of the events listed above. For example, if you want to make an event when someone clicks on a specific button, or reads a certain post or article.

Further reading – The Definitive Guide to The Facebook Pixel for WordPress: Best Practices & Installation

How to Install a Facebook Pixel on WordPress Manually

To add the Facebook Pixel to WordPress, you’ll need to install the Facebook Pixel code on your site. You’ll do this by copying the code from Facebook and pasting it into your site’s header.

To get your Pixel code, go to Events Manager in Facebook Ads Manager, and select your ad account. If you don’t already have a Pixel for your ad account, you can create a Pixel now.

You’ll be prompted with installation instructions now. If you’ve already created a Pixel earlier, hit Add Events, then From a New Website to bring up this popup.

Click Install code manually.

Next, copy the Pixel base code. Take this code and paste it into your WordPress site’s code.

You need to paste this between your site’s <head> tags. The most common way is to paste it just before the closing </head> tag.

Now, you can add this directly to your code, or to your site’s theme. If you’ve got a developer, you might want to get them to do this, to ensure nothing gets messed up.

If you’re a non-technical site owner, or just prefer not to mess with your base code, you can use a plugin like Insert Headers and Footers to easily add scripts to your site right from the WordPress dashboard.

After installing and activating the Insert Headers and Footers plugin, just paste the code you copied earlier into the Scripts in Header box. Save and you’re done.

The Facebook Pixel is now installed, but be aware you’ll still need to add Facebook Pixel event code. The base code will track “PageView” events on each page, but you’ll need to add additional lines to this code if you want to track other events.

To do this, you can use Facebook’s event setup tool, or you can paste the standard event code for the events you want to track into your Pixel code.

See all Facebook standard events and their event code here.

How to Add Facebook Pixel to WordPress Using Plugins

The Facebook Pixel code can look pretty daunting to non-developers (like myself). And while installing it manually just comes down to a lot of copy and paste, it’s time-consuming, and it only takes one missed character to mess up your entire code.

That’s why you should consider skipping the technical learning curve and get a plugin to handle everything to do with installing the Facebook Pixel to WordPress, and setting up events.

Facebook has its own official Facebook Pixel for WordPress plugin. However, this plugin is quite limited, has poor reviews and little to no support.

There are other plugins out there that are regularly maintained, supported, and offer much stronger functionality (for free even!).

The Best Facebook Pixel Plugin for WordPress

The best way to add the Facebook Pixel to your site is with the Pixel Cat WordPress plugin.

With this plugin, you can add your Facebook Pixel to WordPress in one click and less than a minute. Seriously, this is how easy it is:

Just install the free plugin, get your Pixel ID from Facebook Events Manager and paste it in the Pixel Cat back end. That’s it – the Pixel is now active on your whole WordPress site.

From this same screen you can set up and customize your events as well. 

Click Add New to set up an event. Choose the event, and which pages you want the event to trigger on.

(The Pro version of Pixel Cat also lets you set up advanced triggers, such as click or hover on a particular element, as well as setting a time delay or scroll % before the event triggers).

This is infinitely easier than copying and pasting a bunch of code yourself. A simple WordPress plugin like this cuts down the time it takes to get your Facebook Pixel tracking up and running, giving you (or your developer) more time for more important tasks.

Aside from installing the Pixel and configuring standard events, Pixel Cat comes with more features that maximize the effectiveness of your Facebook Pixel, such as:

• One-click integration with WooCommerce
• One-click integration with Easy Digital Downloads
• WordPress search triggers
• Advanced triggers (Pro)
• Support for multiple Pixels (Pro)
• Dynamic events (Pro)
• Custom events & parameters (Pro)
• Google AMP integration (Pro)
• UTM tag support (Pro)
• Video events (Pro)
• Advanced matching (Pro)

Testing Your Facebook Pixel

Once you’ve installed your Pixel and set up your events, you’ll want to test it to ensure that your Pixel is indeed working as expected. You’d hate to start running ad campaigns just to have the conversion event wrongly configured.

To do this, get the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Google Chrome.

This extension will show any Pixel activity currently going on in your browser tab. To test your events, perform the event yourself, and click on the Pixel Helper icon to view details.

If your events and/or parameters seem to be off, go back into Pixel Cat’s settings and double-check, then re-test.

Facebook Pixel WordPress Installation – In Summary

The Facebook Pixel is a must for any WordPress site owner who plans to run Facebook Ads. Don’t be put off by the complicated code snippet – the Facebook Pixel is quite simple, especially if you use a WordPress plugin that cuts out all the confusion for you.

To add the Facebook Pixel in WordPress, either install your Pixel manually by copying and pasting your base & event code, or get Pixel Cat Free and have your Facebook Pixel up and running in minutes, without leaving the WordPress dashboard.

For more powerful Pixel configuration, get Pixel Cat Premium, and see some of the incredible things the Pixel is capable of.

To learn more about how the Facebook Pixel works, how to add Facebook Pixel events to track, and best practices, see our ultimate WordPress Facebook Pixel guide.

The post How to Add the Facebook Pixel to WordPress Sites appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Feel like it’s time to spice up your vanilla ice cream content game? Try creating viral quizzes.

Quizzes are a great way to add some excitement to your site, and separate your content from the 1000s of competitors. You’ll keep people on your site longer, get people invested in your content, collect more leads and generate viral social shares.

The Best WordPress Quiz Plugins for 2020

Setting up a quiz for your WordPress site is easy with a simple plugin.

Here are the best WordPress quiz plugins out there today:

1. Quiz Cat

Quiz Cat is one of our plugins (and actually one of our most popular products!). It’s a super easy way to make engaging, viral quizzes on your WordPress site.

Here’s the tl;dr on why this is the most awesome WordPress quiz plugin:

• Multiple quiz types: build a personality quiz, viral quiz, trivia quiz
• Lightweight
• Easy to use and setup
• Lead capture & social sharing options
• Lead segmentation via merge tags
• Gutenberg compatible

There are two quiz types to choose from. You can build a test-style quiz (“How much do you know about Star Wars?”, “Can you name every US state’s capital?”) or a personality-style quiz (“Which Seinfeld character are you?, “Which cocktail best suits you?”).

The backend interface is designed to be as simple as possible – setting it up is not a quiz in and of itself. Just set up the opening screen for your quiz, then one-by-one, set up your questions, answers and quiz results.

When you’re done, insert your quiz into a post with shortcodes or Gutenberg blocks.

The most powerful thing comes in the lead capture features. You can require quiz participants to enter their email to get their results, which is amazing for growing your email list, fast. You can even send results and answers to your email marketing provider, to segment your leads.

The Quiz Cat quiz plugin comes in free and premium versions. Only the test option is available in the free version, so you’ll need to grab Quiz Cat premium to build personality quizzes, as well as lead capture, analytics and design customization.

2. Quiz And Survey Master

This WordPress quiz plugin doubles as a tool to create surveys. This makes it a very flexible plugin, suited for a number of different use cases.

You can set up a wide array of question types, such as true/false, multiple choice, open answer, fill in the blank, and more. You can add hints to questions, and customize your questions’ description, including adding video/images.

Quiz and Survey Master also comes with certificates and leaderboards for your quiz participants.

There is a basic free version available. Paid add-ons are available to buy, as well as two premium yearly license subscriptions, which open up features such as email provider integrations, analytics, advanced leaderboards and question logic.

3. ARI Stream Quiz

ARI Stream Quiz is another simple WordPress quiz plugin, that lets you create knowledge or trivia tests and viral personality quizzes. It makes building a quiz easy, with an uncomplicated backend, in which you just have to set up your results, questions and answers and hit “Save”.

There are multiple design themes to choose from, but overall the ability to customize your quizzes’ design is somewhat limited.

When a quiz is ready to be published, it’s easy to add to a WordPress post with a simple shortcode. Quizzes are designed to be responsive and work on all kinds of devices. 

Advanced features such as personality quizzes, analytics, full social sharing options and lead capture are available in the pro version of ARI Stream Quiz.

4. Interact

Interact is a premium quiz builder for site owners and marketers who are serious about integrating quizzes with their content marketing strategy.

It’s actually a web app, so you’ll set up your quiz and host it all on their site. Once it’s all ready to go, you can embed your quiz on just about any kind of website or landing page with an embed code, or use their WordPress plugin to add quizzes directly to your WordPress site. (You’ll need to sign up for an account first, before you can use the free plugin).

The types of quizzes you can create with Interact are:

• Personality quizzes
• Scored quizzes
• Multiple-choice “assessment” quizzes

The app also provides you with 800+ quiz templates to help you get started.

Setup on the backend is a little more complicated than other tools on this list, but the payoff is more power and customization options.

There is a free version available with limited functionality (also all quizzes made in the free version are publicly visible). If you want to benefit from the full feature set, you’ll need to subscribe to a paid subscription, which starts at $29/mo for the “lite” monthly plan, while it goes up to $89/mo for access to analytics, conversion tracking and to remove the Interact branding from your quizzes.

5. LearnDash

LearnDash is more than a simple quiz maker. It’s actually an “LMS” plugin – a “Learning Management System” designed for creating professional educational content.

While other plugins on this list are perfectly suited for viral personality or trivia quizzes, LearnDash is more for people with educational sites or online courses. The main benefit is their powerful quiz builder, which allows you to build educational tests and assessments with ease.

Features include eight different question types – single answer, multiple choice, sorting, matching, fill-in-the-blank, free text, survey, and essay – question banks, quiz timers, limit attempts, hints, and flexibility with question display.

LearnDash manages all other aspects of your course as well, not just the quiz – making it a complete LMS plugin.

6. Thrive Quiz Builder

Thrive Quiz Builder is a deep and comprehensive tool for building viral quizzes to use in your marketing strategy. There’s a bit more of a learning curve than some of the other WordPress quiz plugins, however it’s more extensive and powerful than many as well.

You can build one of four different quiz types, based on the end result you’re going to give out.

• Number: give a single number as a result, e.g. “20 points”.
• Percentage: display results as a percentage, e.g. “100%”.
• Category: a personality-style quiz, e.g. “what type of burger are you”.
• Right/Wrong: a simple correct/incorrect answer for each question.

You’re offered a range of design styles to choose from – the pre-set design templates include the opening page, questions & answers, email optin form and results page (all these are editable too).

You’ll set up your questions and answers in a tree-like format, able to choose which question follows each answer.

You can also weigh questions differently, by applying more or less points to each answer. This is particularly useful for creating super comprehensive personality quizzes.

The plugin uses the Thrive Architect page builder to allow you to customize your results page, making it possible to build a mini-landing page for your quiz.

Other must-have features such as email gating, social sharing are also included.

As part of Thrive’s suite of tools, this quiz builder is built specifically for marketers – people wanting to use quizzes to get more leads or make more sales.

The plugin starts at $67 for a one year license for one site, or as part of the Thrive Membership suite.

7. WP Quiz

WP Quiz is another tool designed for building viral buzzfeed-style quizzes. It has the classic multi-choice layout, which can be used for trivia or personality quizzes, as well as interesting variations like flip cards and “swiper” quizzes.

You can also build an interactive list post, where you’ll create a list of items (e.g. “Top 10 Winter Getaways”) and users can upvote or downvote items on the list.

The premium version allows lead capture, and quizzes that require a user to log in via Facebook to take the quiz.

All in all, this plugin leans heavily towards the viral aspect of quizzes, as opposed to some others on this list which are more suited for professional use cases.

WP Quiz has a free and a premium version, however the free version is somewhat limited. Support appears to be hard to come by for the free version, with some negative reviews on the WordPress plugins page citing this. So it definitely appears that the premium version ($77 for a one year license) is necessary to get the full power of WP Quiz.

8. Gravity Forms Quiz Add-on

If you’re a Gravity Forms user, and are looking for a super simple way to integrate a quiz with a tool already in use on your site, this quiz add-on is a great choice. It’s not really a standalone plugin, but if you’re a subscriber to Gravity Forms’ elite license, you’ll already have this available to you.

The quiz add-on lets you add quiz fields to a form, which are scored when the person submits the form. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other plugins, but does have some powerful features such as weighted scoring, conditional logic, answer explanations, and the ability to randomize choices.

There aren’t quiz-specific design options, but it can be customized with code (which most subscribers to the Gravity Forms elite license will be able to do). 

The main advantage of using this add-on to create quizzes is the simplicity – if you’re in need of a simple quiz, without any flashy features, this will get you up and running a lot quicker than most other plugins.

Why You Should Use Quizzes on Your WordPress Site

Let’s expand on the benefits of quizzes for your site.

In a day when most content is pretty much the same, one thing that makes your blog post stand out from the next one can have a massive impact.

Buzzfeed used quizzes to perfection in their early growth, and is now one of the top 500 sites in the world.

Since then, many others have jumped on the quiz bandwagon to great success.

While basic written content can bring in a lot of visitors, this doesn’t always generate money (or whatever the desired result is) for your site. 

But engagement? That’s where the real money is.

Here are some big benefits of quizzes:

Time on Site

Fun, engaging quizzes keep people on your site longer, which is something every site owner should be interested in. Not only does time on site and bounce rate positively affect SEO, it also gives you more time to sell to that person, or leave a lasting impression with them.

Social Media Shares

Quizzes can generate more traffic to your site, and in some cases even go viral. If you add social media sharing buttons to your quiz, a lot of people will naturally share your quiz to share their knowledge in the topic or match up against their friends.

This is a free, organic source of traffic that can prove very fruitful. In the case your quiz goes viral, it can even result in a huge flood of traffic to your site.

Lead Generation

Adding an option or requirement for people to get their results via email is a super easy way to grow your email list. Once someone has gone through the effort of taking the quiz, they will almost always certainly be willing to hand over their email address to see what their result is. This makes quizzes an amazing lead magnet and optin bait.

Need proof? In 2016, quiz app LeadQuizzes reported an average 33.6% conversion rate on quizzes from their users. That’s insane!

Lead Nurturing/Qualifying

Not only are quizzes an excellent way to get new leads, they’re also great at qualifying leads and optimizing your funnel.

You can use quizzes to gauge someone’s knowledge or interest in a particular topic, which you can then use to customize the next step to take with them. A lot of plugins (including Quiz Cat) allow you to send information like quiz results and answers to your email marketing provider or CRM, making it even easier to use your quiz to segment leads.

Features of Awesome WordPress Quiz Plugins

If you want to do your own scouting, instead of taking our recommendation on the best quiz plugin for WordPress, here are some must-have features to look out for.

• Multiple quiz types: you want some variety on the type of quizzes you can build. Personality quizzes and knowledge or trivia quizzes are the most popular types of quiz.
• Lead capture: this is one of the biggest benefits of using quizzes in your content marketing strategy, so make sure you use a plugin that can capture leads!
• Email marketing integrations: above just capturing emails, it makes everything a lot smoother if you can integrate with your email marketing tool (MailChimp, Drip etc) and automatically send emails to your list. Bonus points if you can use the quiz to segment/tag users.
• Social media sharing: again, social sharing is a hugely valuable feature of quizzes. Make sure it’s easy for quiz takers to share their results.
• Analytics: being able to view stats on your quiz is another valuable feature. Find that a lot of people are dropping off from your quiz at one question and not finishing? Now you know how to get more people to continue on and complete the quiz.
• Analytics tool integrations: you want to be able to hook up your quiz with Google Analytics, the Facebook Pixel or other analytics tools/code.
• Easy to create: coming up with questions for your quiz can be difficult, so make sure that building the quiz in WordPress isn’t. The best quiz plugins make it a breeze to add questions, answers and results.

Summing Up – What Is the Best WordPress Quiz Plugin?

We may be biased, but we designed Quiz Cat to be the best WordPress quiz plugin due to the mix of simplicity and power. It’s a great fit for hobbyist and pro site owners alike. So if you want to start getting more leads, social shares, traffic and engagement, this the plugin you should use.

Besides Quiz Cat, there are other options depending on your needs. LearnDash is great for creating high-quality, professional tests, Interact is a powerful quiz tool for anyone willing to spend for a premium option and Quiz and Survey Master is a solid tool for building and implementing surveys. Otherwise, if you’re already a Thrive Member or Gravity Forms Elite user, there are tools already available to you.

The post 8 Best Quiz Plugins for WordPress appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

We’ve got a brand new release out for Pixel Cat. It makes our Facebook Pixel implementation for WordPress even more powerful.

If you’re not yet using the Pixel Cat to Pixel & retarget your site visitors on Facebook Ads, now is a great time to start! And if you are using our awesome plugin, you’ll want to read on to see just what’s new with the product.

What’s New With Pixel Cat?

Here’s a rundown of what’s new with Pixel Cat, one of our most powerful plugins.

Video Events

You can now use Pixel Cat to track video events on your site.

Video is a really powerful way of engaging site visitors, and using the Pixel to track this engagement is a great way to create super-targeted Facebook audiences.

In the Pixel Cat settings, you’ll see an option for “Video Events”. Turn this on to start firing the Pixel for your videos.

When turned on, Pixel Cat will automatically fire events for any YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia videos embedded on your posts and pages.

Here are the events, triggers and parameters that will be fired:

–

trigger: start video play (eg clicking play button)

event: ‘VideoPlay’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video paused

event: ‘VideoPause’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’, ‘percentage_watched’

–

trigger: video finished

event: ‘VideoWatchToEnd’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video watched 10%

event: ‘VideoWatch10Percent’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video watched 25%

event: ‘VideoWatch25Percent’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video watched 50%

event: ‘VideoWatch50Percent’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video watched 75%

event: ‘VideoWatch75Percent’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

–

trigger: video watched 90%

event: ‘VideoWatch90Percent’

parameters: ‘video_title’, ‘video_url’, ‘video_id’

Event Matching for Dynamic Ads & Variable Products

Pixel Cat has been upgraded to properly support variations amongst WooCommerce products. Dynamic ads will now work with variable products (for example, if you’re selling multiple sizes or colors of a product), and Pixel Cat will send the full variable SKU of these items along with events (rather than just the parent SKU).

If you’re new to dynamic ads on Facebook, check out this video:

Support For WooCommerce 4.0

WooCommerce recently released version 4.0 of the platform – so we’ve made sure the Pixel Cat WooCommerce integration works seamlessly with the new release.

Better Integrations with Fatcat Apps Plugins

Our plugin bundle is one of our most popular products, due to the ease at which our plugins work together. This is especially true for Pixel Cat, which comes with integrations with the other plugins in our suite of tools.

That’s why we’ve made some small updates to make sure Pixel Cat works as efficiently as possible with our other plugins. The biggest change is to plugins with GDPR settings (Landing Page Cat, Optin Cat, Quiz Cat). The “lead” event previously fired before the form had actually been submitted for plugins with the GDPR checkbox enabled. It will now correctly fire after the user has completed the entire form submission.

We’re excited about the new and improved Pixel Cat, and you should be too!

If you haven’t started using Pixel Cat to build your Facebook audiences, now is a great time!

Get Pixel Cat Premium

The post Pixel Cat Update: Video Events & More Powerful WooCommerce Integration appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

There are more than 500 million blogs in the world, with more than 2 million posts made each day.

We’ve come a long way from when blogging was just a fun pastime. For thousands, even millions of people, it’s a way of life.

Whether you want to be a professional blogger, or just want a fun thing to do on the side, I’m sure you still want to make your blog the best it can be. That means creating it in the environment best suited for your blog to grow.

Unless you’re interested in the “microblogging” style of a site like Tumblr, WordPress and Medium are the two clear-cut best platforms for you to kick off your awesome blog.

You could spend hours, days or weeks weighing up the pros and cons of WordPress vs Medium. Or, you could read this post comparing the two, and get on with building your blog.

What is Medium, and what is WordPress?

First of all, let’s introduce the two.

Medium is kind of a hybrid between a blogging platform and a social network. On Medium you create an account, and can write posts, follow topics or other authors, and get a daily feed of stories catered to you. In some ways, it’s a long-form version of Twitter.

It’s easy to publish articles on Medium – just go through their easy user interface, and your content will be published at the click of a button. Though you are submitting your content to being part of Medium’s platform, not totally under your own control.

WordPress on the other hand is a full content management system, or CMS. It’s actually much bigger than just a blogging platform, used to power 34% of all the websites on the net today. However its flexibility means it’s a great base for bloggers to use, after taking the time to set up a few things to set your site live.

WordPress.org vs WordPress.com – Know the Difference!

We should make mention that there are two different WordPress platforms. On the surface they may look the same, but there’s a big difference under the hood. So it’s important not to get them mixed up!

WordPress.org is a content management system, which offers almost limitless possibilities for your website. But then you have WordPress.com, which is a blogging platform, designed more for casual bloggers or beginners. WordPress.com has a lot more limitations with what you can do than WordPress.org.

While WordPress.com can be a decent platform if you’re a casual blogger with no intentions to grow your blog any larger, Medium offers generally the same functionality, and better.

For this article, when we’re talking about WordPress, we’ll be referring to WordPress.org.

4 Advantages of Medium

It’s hosted for you

With Medium you don’t have to worry about your blog staying up, paying hosting fees, or slow loading speed turning away viewers. All the nuts and bolts on the backend are handled by Medium, which means anyone (ANYONE) can start a blog.

All you need to do is write. Forget about servers, bandwidth, or anything like that.

Built-in traffic and audience

Probably the biggest advantage is that you’re not solely responsible for driving traffic to your blog. If you just want to write, and don’t want to worry so much about promotion, Medium is the place for you. If you write great content, people will find you and start following. 

Easy to share and find new followers

Medium comes with a pre-built audience, but if you want to do a little promotion yourself as well, it’s super easy. The social networking component of Medium is tailor-made for sharing and growing your audience. You can follow other authors, cross-promote, and grow your network to where you get eyes on every new piece you put out.

Easy writing experience

Finally, Medium has a very user-friendly writing interface, which makes it great for bloggers who just want to write, without any extra hoopla.

If you want to make something with a more creative visual look, Medium might come up short. But for writing clean blog posts, designed for easy reading and quick publishing, it’s the one for you.

How to Start a Blog on Medium

Starting a blog on Medium is a cinch. That’s the big advantage of Medium as a blogging platform.

All you have to do is open an account, click “New Story”, and start writing.

It’s that easy. Once you’re ready, you can publish your post for the world to see. It’s simple to add images and media embeds to your post, and you can add tags to help your posts be found by your target audience.

You may also want to sign up for the Medium partner program, making your posts members-only and allowing you to earn based on readership and engagement levels.

4 Advantages of WordPress(.org)

More flexibility

While Medium is easy to use, WordPress allows you to do much more with your blog or website. You can do a lot more to the look of your site, with a ton of beautiful free and premium themes. The extensive catalogue of plugins lets you add all kinds of features, such as email optins, contact forms, widgets, interactive quizzes, and much, much more. All without needing any knowledge of coding.

And then, if you do know a bit of code, you can make your own modifications to your blog on the backend (or you can hire someone to do it for you).

More monetization options

If you want to grow your blog to make money, WordPress makes it a whole lot easier. You can still earn from Medium – by setting your posts as members-only you can earn a chunk of Medium subscribers’ fees. But it’s not close to what is possible from a proper WordPress site.

When your self-hosted WordPress.org site starts to kick off, you have a ton of monetization options, such as running ads on your site, affiliate links, sponsorship deals, publishing paid guest posts, and more.

Zero restrictions

Publishing on someone else’s platform (as you are with Medium) means complying with their rules. While Medium’s rules aren’t super strict, it’s still a restriction on what you can and can’t post. If you want total freedom for what you can post, without the risk that one day your blog will get taken down, you’ll want to run the DIY route with WordPress.

Own 100% of your site

You’re proud of your content. It’s awesome. So why should someone else own it?

While it’s easy to publish a blog on a dedicated blogging platform, there’s always the cloud that you don’t fully own what you post. The bigger your blog gets, the more concerned you should be about not having full control over your platform. That’s a worry you don’t have with WordPress.

How to Start a WordPress Blog

It takes a little more time to start writing with WordPress, compared to Medium. But the payoff is much more flexibility and full control over your content.

First, you will need hosting and a domain name. You can search and buy available domains from sites like GoDaddy and Domain.com.

You can also purchase a domain directly through many hosting sites.

Once you have your domain, you need to host it (connecting it with a server, that uploads all your site data to make it visible online). Do a little research over which hosting company is best suited for you. 

Now you need to install WordPress. Most hosting companies make it very easy, with one-click installation.

Once complete, your hosting company will send you the login details for your site, and you can go ahead and start writing. Go to “Posts” and click “Add New” to start writing your first post.

If you’re not too worried about appearance, or added extras like plugins and widgets, you can get started with the default WordPress themes. However, eventually you may want to customize your site just how you like it, with countless theme and plugin options.

Final Verdict: WordPress vs Medium

The question you’ve been waiting for… which one is better?

The question is totally situational, as each platform has its own advantages, as outlined above.

To sum it up, Medium is a great option for casual bloggers, who want to use blogging as an avenue to share their opinion or flex their creative muscles, without worrying about monetization or scaling into anything bigger.

WordPress is a better option for serious bloggers, who want to create a blog that could one day turn into a moneymaking vehicle. 

If you want more options, such as customizable themes, plugins, widgets, as well as full control over your blog, and are willing to put a little cost and effort up-front, WordPress is the best platform to choose.

The post WordPress vs Medium: Where to Publish Your Blog appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Setting up a local WordPress environment is a healthy alternative to making adjustments to your live website. It sounds complicated, and to some extent it is, but you won’t face any issues if you carefully read this article.

What Is a Local WordPress Environment?

A local WordPress environment lets you store your site’s files and database on your hard drive. A server keeps your live site’s files while a local environment creates a virtual server that stores the same files. Everything happens on your computer!

Why Use a Local Environment?

A local environment is a must for anyone who wants to learn the ins and outs of WordPress. Sooner or later, you will have to set up such an environment. Here are some of the most important advantages:

1.    Learn WordPress Development

You won’t learn WordPress without practicing, and a local site is golden in this respect. You can tweak the code, change permissions, modify core files, or customize the theme without worries because nothing bad can happen. In addition to a good text editor and perhaps a big cup of coffee, a local environment is the perfect way to learn to create plugins or themes.

2.    Test New Themes and Plugins

Nowadays, a site needs constant improvements or extended functionalities. That means that you should install and test new plugins and themes. Unfortunately, some plugins or themes might be incompatible with one another, causing the site to malfunction or even crash. On top of that, the newly installed themes and plugins might not be what you expected. Avoid these unwanted scenarios by using a clone of your site on the local environment. It takes time, but you will rest assured that your site looks and works how you want it to.

3.    Independent of Internet

Do you like to work outdoors but don’t have a powerful wireless internet connection? A local environment is the solution because it doesn’t rely on an internet connection. Much more, a local environment is way more secure because you aren’t connected to the internet, and every web page loads faster because all the files are stored on your hard drive.

How to Set Up a Local Environment

The above advantages should have convinced you that your set of coding tools should include a local environment. Countless developers have countless ideas about the perfect environment, so there are no set-in-stone components of a local environment. However, the vast majority of WordPress developers agree that the following tools are mandatory:

• A local server environment
• A text editor
• A developer-friendly browser

Local Server Environments

A local server environment is the most important tool for WordPress development. You can’t run a WordPress site unless you use one of the below recommendations.

Local by Flywheel

If you are like me and don’t have patience, then Local by Flywheel is for you! All you have to do is to download it, click a few times to install it, and fill out the basic information, such as website name, admin username, password, and email address. Now you have a robust local server on which to create WordPress sites.

Local by Flywheel is the most user-friendly interface among all local servers. If you are stuck while installing it, watch the video on the homepage showing you how to set up the local server.

Local by Flywheel comes with three price tiers, including a free basic plan that is more than enough for tweaking the code and testing new themes and plugins.

DesktopServer

DesktopServer is another simple and effective option for local servers. It’s simple to set up, and a plethora of developers are satisfied with it, so give it a chance.

In the beginning, use the free version, which allows you to create WordPress sites, supports domain name mapping, and automatically generates a virtual host. The premium version includes all these features and many others, such as multisite support, website exports and archive, and direct deployment onto a live server.

DesktopServer works on both Mac and Windows.

XAMPP

XAMPP stands for Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Pearl, and it’s one of the most popular pieces of software for creating local servers. Despite its popularity, XAMPP isn’t simple to install, but once it’s set up, it will considerably streamline your work.

Fortunately, you can watch YouTube tutorials showing you how to install XAMPP. For instance, this video reveals how to install XAMPP on Windows 10.

XAMPP works on Mac and Windows.

Vagrant

Vagrant is an open source software suitable for larger WordPress sites. It creates virtual boxes, and users are free to choose the proper one from the library. Of course, there is a box that mimics a host for WordPress sites. I recommend Vagrant for experienced WordPress users.

Text Editors

A text editor will save you plenty of time if you edit code regularly. Many, if not most, highlight the syntax and help you avoid mistakes. You can use your operating system’s default text editor, but it doesn’t come with too many productive features. Check out the following suggestions and consider using one of them to write code like a pro.

Notepad++

The single downside of this text editor is that it works only for Windows users. Unlike Notepad—the default Windows text editor—Notepad++ comes bundled with impressive features for optimal code writing. It works with many coding languages and highlights the syntax. You can also open multiple tabs.

Visual Studio Code

Microsoft launched Visual Studio Code in 2015. Since then, an army of coders has used it with satisfaction. It’s suitable for writing code in HTML and CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, so feel free to use it to customize WordPress themes and plugins.

One of the advantages of Visual Studio Code is the large number of extensions available on the marketplace. For instance, use Debugger for Chrome to debug JavaScript code in your Chrome browser.

Brackets

Brackets is a free text editor that works on both Mac and Windows. Unlike other text editors, it lets you extract data from PSD files—Adobe developed both Photoshop and Brackets.

Developer-friendly Browser

You need a developer-friendly browser to display the output of your code. All major browsers have helping tools for developers, but Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are the best. Use whatever browser you want, but consider testing one of these two options.

Wrapping Up

Setting up a local WordPress development environment is a necessity if you want to sharpen your WordPress skills. Configuring the local server is the most challenging part, but the endeavor is paid off in the long run. The above suggestions are tried and tested by us, but there are many other top-notch alternatives. Do you have any tips? Which tools do you use? Drop us a comment with your tools of choice.

About the Author

Rikard is a full stack WordPress developer with a passion for maintenance and page speed optimisation. Rikard is currently working as a project manager at SteadyWP.

The post Why and How to Set Up a Local WordPress Environment appeared first on Fatcat Apps.