Episode 80: Retargeting, Focus, and Other Listener Questions

Today we’re going to be talk about updates on what we’ve been up to recently. Then we’ll answer some of the questions that have come in from our readers and listeners. Sit back and enjoy the show!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The two areas that Pippin has decided to focus on in 2017: Business growth and polishing all of the products.

Thoughts on retargeting: What programs Brad and Pippin use, how the results are measured, and how to evaluate the trends over time.

How a price increase at Easy Digital Downloads has affected interactions between customers and the EDD team and the revenue.

Some of the new EDD add-ons that the team is breathing new life into.

Information on the new employees at both Easy Digital Downloads and Delicious Brains.

How Brad found their new marketer by defining exactly what they were looking for.

Some of the limitations of Mergebot Beta and what DB will be doing before the launch.

The process of moving attachments to another bucket in the upcoming WP Offload S3 1.5.

Some of the conferences that Brad and Pippin have been to and are planning to go to.

The proper way to give attribution when borrowing license codes rather than starting from scratch for a particular project.

Whether it’s important to have an index.php file in every directory within your plugin.

Links and Resources:

Perfect Audience

AdRoll

Optimize

Reflection on a Price Increase

Laravel

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 80. This time Pippin and I will be going over updates on what we’ve been up to and, if we have any extra time, we’re going to answer a couple of listener questions.

Pippin, would you like to start us off? What have you been up to, man?

PIPPIN: Sure. It’s been a while. It’s been at least a month since our last episode. And I believe it’s been three to four months since we last gave updates, so there’s a number of things that we’ve been working on. I’ll start off the top.

First, this whole year, 2017, really, we decided that we’re going to focus a lot more on two areas of the business, and this was largely what I’m working on and what a couple of my team members are working on with me. That is business growth and polishing all of the products.

We have a habit of working very fast, pushing out a lot of new things, pushing out updates a lot. We are going to rein that back a little bit and focus primarily on polishing things. We want to make things a lot smoother. We want to make things work better for people. We want to make the onboarding better. So there’s a lot of focus in that area, and that’s going to be throughout the rest of the year as well. There are some initial results coming out of that already.

Then the other one is focusing on business growth, and we’re really starting to do a marketing push for our products, which is something that we’ve never really done before. I mean I like to tell people that I’m a terrible marketer, which is completely true. We are trying to actually take a new look at how we can utilize a really good marketing effort for the company.

Then there’s two little things that we’ve done recently that have had some pretty interesting results. The first one is I played with retargeting ads for the first time. I don’t know why it took me so long to play with them because it took about five minutes to set up. The results are pretty fascinating. If you haven’t done it and you have a product, I would definitely recommend at least testing them out.

BRAD: Are you using Facebook’s retargeting or are you using Perfect Audience?

PIPPIN: We are using Perfect Audience.

BRAD: Okay. Yeah. AdRoll is the one we use, but it’s very simple. I’ve tried Perfect Audience, and AdRoll and Perfect Audience are almost the same.

PIPPIN: Yeah, that