Kissmetrics vs. WordPress

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

Incentivized

Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.

Incentivized

• The more events you track and properties you send along, the more you can see how specific users use your product/service. The user based timeline gives you a perfect start point to get in touch with users, because you can see where they get stuck.
• Tracking your traffic sources and how they influence conversions is awesome. You can get a perfect view of how much a traffic source contributes to revenue.
• Funnel reports give you more insights into micro and macro conversion steps and give you actionable data to work with.
• Customer support!

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

Incentivized

• Installing.... yes this is also a negative. While you can install and have the program running in minutes, if you use Unbounce, the form tracking process is quite complicated!
• Updates... I feel like the product updates have slowed a lot lately. Thankfully, the product functionality is so amazing that it hasn't impeded the use of it. However, it is still disappointing to see less frequent software updates.
• Occasionally clunky UI... there are a few reports that are really easy to mess up and leave you scratching your head on why it isn't showing you any data.

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

Price sensitivity and the different choices that now exist in the Analytics industry. I think it makes sense for us sometime this year to rethink our analytics strategy to see how we may leverage the best of GA (which has included lots of new features and updates the past years_, Kiss and other tools as need be

The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it

Incentivized

Right after login, you'll get to a dashboard which shows you a quick view on how your business is doing across the events you are tracking. There is no need to dig deeper than that unless you want to, in which case it's very easy to do so just by clicking on the metric on which you want more information. The interface is very intuitive.

Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.

Incentivized

The application was very rarely down; during the period we used the application, I can think of only two or three occasions in which the site was down. Notably, at no time was the the performance of our own site compromised as a result.

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

Our front-line product support person (Mika) is great. She is responsive and great to work with.

However, the data accuracy issue described earlier is the reason for the low score here. This issue was escalated from front-line to support to level 2 technical support and then it disappeared into a black hole. Escalations, in general, do not go well. We get no response for days, or I have to chase things down. This is not acceptable. Marketing metrics are critically important to me and I need answers quickly. I cannot afford to wait around for days / weeks for a response.

Just to be clear, these comments only apply to escalated support issues.

I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.

Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

Kissmetrics is a next-level step up for people who are used to getting their tracking and reporting from Google Analytics or Shopify's CMS. While HubSpot arguably has a better user interface, Kissmetrics certainly has the power and usability necessary to track important conversion data and help you make better marketing decisions.

Incentivized

WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• Unfortunately for this client (small business) the cost of Kissmetrics was just too prohibitive. But it's obvious that for a larger company that can afford it, the data would be invaluable to gain more insight in how to gain more active users and orders for a funnel.
• The data provided really increases an understanding of how best to provide the right experience for the users...happy users equals increase in ROI.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized