Why Comparative Metrics are Key to the Future

Published August 6th, 2012 in News, Thoughts by George Ortiz 0

For a long time now, since the first post was published using WordPress, people have been intrigued with how their content is received by others. Does anyone read it? What do they think? The spark of human intrigue when putting content on the web for all to see has been burning bright since the beginning and continues to burn bright to this day. From top publishers such as The New York Times and TechCrunch, to students in NYC using WordPress for the first time.

In Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address this past Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco, Matt shared that WordPress is now behind 16.7 percent of the web. This wide spread adoption of WordPress has given all of us, not just WordPress users, a valuable tool to gain insights never before available on the content we publish.

We’re All In This Together

We all want the web to be a better place, with great user experiences and a solid sense of usability that allows everyone to consume the content they see valuable. More so, we want to contribute. We want to share our thoughts and create our own valuable content for others to learn from. Every blog powered by WordPress and all other sites out there are all engaged together for this common purpose. There are startups out there such as Circa, co-founded by CEO Matt Galligan, that aim to deliver content in new and innovative ways. There are other startups out there such as Seshn that aim to help us publish, curate, and discover content. At the core, we are all in this together. This massive existence around democratizing publishing and consuming the content that comes from it.

A Bright Future

As WordPress continues to grow and new technologies emerge around creating and curating content, we as WordPress developers, designers, and publishers have an immense responsibility to do our part. To engage others and help strengthen the web we’ve all come to help create. This collaboration and cohesive vision for the future can cultivate into those great user experiences and shape the web of the future.

Sadly, most of the content and work being done outside of WordPress Core development has been largely based on illusions. Illusions that stem from decisions being made on all the wrong ideas and metrics. For example, within the premium WordPress theme world, many themes are created not from what is best for content creators, but from sales and download data. That’s why we’re currently seeing an average abandonment rate of 63% among themes.

What We’re Doing

Here at PressTrends, we’re trying to do out part by creating products to help aid developers, designers, and content creators in building a better web. For developers and designers, we launched PressTrends.io, an analytics tool to help deliver insights into adoption and usage for WordPress themes and plugins. But now, we’ve entered a new stage. A stage centered on content creators.

This past Saturday we launched PressTrends.me, a tool that offers metrics on your content and delivers benchmarks from the community and sites similar to yours, all in an effort to offer insights and suggestions on how to improve in areas where you’re underperforming.

The vision behind the entire PressTrends platform has always been for content creators, the open web, and the betterment of publishing itself.

We’ve released PressTrends.me for free and the base plugin for WordPress will remain free forever. We see this as our gift to the web. A powerful tool for all to use, to gain insights into their content, and to share with all for the betterment of the entire web.

Why Comparative Metrics are Key to the Future

From the top publishers to first time WordPress authors, we should all strive to share content and learn how to share that content in the best way for others to consume. We see the best way to learn is from each other.

Current analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, and others focus on providing metrics for our sites, though leave out benchmarking. Which leaves all of us guessing as to how well we’re doing. They also leave the insights up to us to figure out in hopes we can all learn to be data analysts. Now, we highly recommend these platforms, though see the need for something more.

That’s why we created PressTrends. We wanted a platform that allows us to democratize data in a way that we can learn from each other and come together in way to build a better web with the content we publish and consume. The best way to achieve this is through delivering comparative metrics, or benchmarks, and offering suggestions on how to improve in areas where our site is underperforming.

Since we have over 120,000 sites using over 900 themes and plugins, we have a good base of data to benchmark and offer theme and plugin suggestions whose site’s are beating the averages or benchmarks for core metrics.

Soon, we will also be releasing integrations into Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, and others to benchmark and extend the insights to the entire web.

We’re Only As Good As the Community

Obviously, we need more sites using the platform to gain real insight and solid benchmarks. That’s why we’re keeping PressTrends for WordPress free. The more the community comes together, the more we can learn from each other. So go ahead and download the plugin, integrate PressTrends into your theme and plugins, and help spread the word about the platform and offer suggestions on how we can improve it.

We love the web, we love WordPress, and we’re here to stay. We see a huge need and have a focused vision for what is needed. Not to build a huge company, but to build a brighter future. Join us in democratizing data as you’ve joined in democratizing publishing.

Here’s to the future.

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