Blog

We just got finished with a small website upgrade for one of our valued clients, Colombian Sportswear. Often, while we are working on projects, we are also gathering information to be able to add as blog or newsletter material later.

As such, I wanted to revisit an old but important topic – checking your reports. It’s soooooo important – especially if you expect to scale your business.

In this case we will discuss a specific type of report, one for a shopping cart that is built using WordPress and WooCommerce, combined.

Running a successful WooCommerce store is no easy task. With so many variables at play, it’s crucial to know which metrics to track and how to analyze them for the betterment of your business.

In this blog post, I will guide you through the best metrics for your WooCommerce store, based on the information provided by WooCommerce.com. We will also provide step-by-step instructions on how to locate certain reports in your WooCommerce dashboard.

Sales and Revenue Metrics

The backbone of any successful eCommerce business is sales and revenue. These metrics help you understand your overall performance and inform your marketing and sales strategies. Some essential sales and revenue metrics include:

• Gross sales
• Net sales
• Number of orders
• Average order value

To locate these metrics in your WooCommerce dashboard:

• Go to your WordPress dashboard
• Navigate to ‘WooCommerce’ > ‘Reports’
• Under the ‘Orders’ tab, you will find the relevant sales and revenue metrics

Customer Metrics

Knowing who your customers are and understanding their behavior is key to creating targeted marketing campaigns and improving the overall shopping experience. Some important customer metrics include:

• New vs. returning customers
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• Average acquisition cost

To locate these metrics in your WooCommerce dashboard:

• Go to ‘WooCommerce’ > ‘Reports’
• Navigate to the ‘Customers’ tab to find new vs. returning customers data
• For CLTV and average acquisition cost, you might need additional plugins or analytics tools, such as Metorik, to track these metrics

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, website design, and overall user experience. Important conversion metrics include:

• Conversion rate
• Cart abandonment rate
• Checkout completion rate

To locate these metrics in your WooCommerce dashboard:

• Go to ‘WooCommerce’ > ‘Reports’
• Navigate to the ‘Orders’ tab for conversion rate data
• For cart abandonment and checkout completion rates, consider using plugins like Cart Reports or WooCommerce Conversion Tracking

Product Metrics

Product metrics provide insights into the performance of individual products or product categories, helping you identify top-selling items and underperforming products. Key product metrics include:

• Top-selling products
• Product category performance
• Product views

To locate these metrics in your WooCommerce dashboard:

• Go to ‘WooCommerce’ > ‘Reports’
• Navigate to the ‘Products’ tab for top-selling products and product category performance
• For product views, you can use Google Analytics or additional plugins to track this data

Traffic and Engagement Metrics

Traffic and engagement metrics help you understand where your visitors are coming from and how they interact with your website. These insights can help you optimize your marketing channels and improve user experience. Important traffic and engagement metrics include:

• Website traffic sources
• Bounce rate
• Time on site

To locate these metrics, you will need to use Google Analytics:

• Set up Google Analytics for your WooCommerce store
• Go to your Google Analytics dashboard
• Navigate to ‘Acquisition’ > ‘All Traffic’ > ‘Channels’ for traffic sources data
• For bounce rate and time on site, go to ‘Behavior’ > ‘Site Content’ > ‘All Pages’

Conclusion:

Understanding and tracking these essential eCommerce metrics will help you make informed decisions and continually optimize your WooCommerce store. Regularly analyzing these data points will enable you to identify trends, address issues, and capitalize on opportunities for growth. Happy selling!

I am excited to announce that RocklandWeb will be integrating ChatGPT, the cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI, into all of our digital business and audio-visual services, including our 15-year web services division. This integration will bring a new level of automation and efficiency to our capabilities (list below), while also providing a more personalized and engaging experience for our users.

Starting in late January 2023, I’ve instructed our entire team to start thinking of ways to use ChatGPT in ways that simply make life easier, while getting the same or better work done for our nearly 250 valued clients across the Hudson Valley. The responses we gathered from this research project was, to say the least…inspiring. That started a deeper conversation about what our new company direction (now including RocklandNews.com and RocklandShopping.com), and its customers – require of us in order to consider our work to be successful.

Let’s face it. The world has changed. No longer can any singular knowledge-working human keep up with their communication and technical support requests, without assistance from a variety of tools that smooth the critical path of a project from start to finish. Multiple steps mean more margin for error. Something needed to change.

Consequently, it made logical sense to leverage the quantum leap natural language models that OpenAI offers, so that we can process the typical support requests we gather with exponential decrease in time allocations, per request.

In short, we get more stuff done – more effectively for our customers, and more efficiently for ourselves.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model that has been trained on a vast corpus of text data, allowing it to generate highly coherent and relevant responses to a wide range of topics. This makes ChatGPT the perfect tool for automating many of the tasks and interactions that are currently performed by humans.

How Will RocklandWeb Integrate ChatGPT?

We will be integrating ChatGPT into all of our services, including customer support, marketing, and product recommendations. This integration will allow us to automate many of the routine tasks that are currently performed by our team, freeing up time and resources for more important tasks.

Some of the services in which we will be employing ChatGPT are as follows:

• Search: Research suitable keywords/keyphrases, titles and content summaries that assist our clients’ search engine rankings
• Social: Generation of more creative and engaging content that is relevant to our client’s end users
• News: Correction of incoming press releases and news items that require grammar or spelling modifications
• Communications: Integration of natural language models that facilitate better rapport of customer support teams with clients, partners and prospective buyers
• Project Management: We will be using natural language models to develop well-crafted text for typical tasks that require a variety of steps. Much like the recipe for a lasagna – if you know what you need to do, you can spend the rest of the time putting love into the final dish.
• Web: Development of logic that works with all of our most oft-used coding procedures, as well as looping in functions, snippets, styling and plugin mods that help our client’s web-based business applications. Basically we’ll be making better code repositories.

At the same time, ChatGPT’s ability to generate human-like text responses will provide a more personalized and engaging experience for our users. Whether they are looking for support, information, or recommendations, ChatGPT will be able to provide quick and accurate responses, 24/7.

Benefits for Our Users

By integrating ChatGPT into all of our services, we are providing a number of benefits for our users, including:

• Faster response times: ChatGPT is always available to respond to user requests, providing faster and more efficient service than traditional human support.
• More personalized experiences: ChatGPT’s ability to generate human-like text responses will provide a more personalized and engaging experience for our users.
• 24/7 availability: With ChatGPT, our users will have access to support and information around the clock, even when our team is not available.

Looking to the Future

We are excited about the integration of ChatGPT into all of our services, and we believe that it will provide a number of benefits for our users and for our team. This is just the first step in our ongoing commitment to using the latest technology to provide the best possible experience for our users.

We look forward to continuing to provide the best possible services to our users, and we are confident that the integration of ChatGPT will play a big role in making that a reality.

Thomas C. Ossa
RockWeb Systems Inc.
Stony Point, NY 10980
(845) 877-7333

Like I said, we’re just getting started.

By Tom Ossa, CEO
Rockland Web Design Inc.
RockWeb Systems Inc.

In September 2022 I wrote a blog post called “Back to My Roots“. I announced a series of free courses – providing more great information on how to grow your business this coming year, and by extension of your good work — yourself. You can read the post and still get free stuff here. No obligation. Two free books from myself and my WorkSmartNY.com partner, Irene Gutmann.

But I’m now adding a bonus, exclusively for our 500+ clients across the Tri-State area.

RocklandWeb is now 15 years old, and it’s afforded us the time to start learning a little deeper about your business model, and how you aim to grow this year.

Join us for a one-on-one, personalized free 20-minute Zoom session, to better learn about how we can make our 2023 line of services better — for you.

This year we’ll be using our vast digital experience and highly talented team of designers, programmers and marketing professionals to help you to grow the right way in 2023.

Fill out the form below to get started, and we’ll send you a Zoom link for your session.

If you wish to contact us to learn more, call (845) 877-7333, dial extension 1 and use the code free2023.

Our goal is to help you do better digital business in 2023. We look forward to meeting with you.

~ Tom

If you can make it to the end of this blog, I’ll give you a free, professional self-help book, available on Amazon for $9.99. That’s how much I believe in what I’m writing here.

Some of you know that I was a Technology Instructor at Rockland BOCES for the past 19 years. I do it mainly because I love it. My Grandfather used to say about me “Put him in front of an audience, and he’s in his glory.”

Of course, I always try to make it valuable. My method has always been to first inspire, then inform, followed by one-on-one adjustments. It takes more time, but it seems to me to be a more effective, consistent method.

This year, due to the need for increased attention on our companies Rockland Web Design, RocklandNews.com and RockWeb Systems, I decided to step down (for now) from teaching at BOCES. I love it, but prepping, traveling, teaching and recuperating definitely draws away my energy for the focus I need to drive the companies forward.

When I started teaching in 2001, I was a vastly different person. I didn’t run two companies, serve on a bunch of local Boards, and didn’t have the responsibility of paying a talented team of web developers, graphic designers, content writers, videographers and programmers. I love it, but it takes a lot of time and care to do it right. I also like my 7 hours of sleep per night.

So, as Einstein said (paraphrased) “energy can not be created nor destroyed. It can only change into different forms.”

Starting September 2022, I’ll be devoting that educational energy to teaching inside the companies – showing people how to work smarter, not harder – so that they can continually aim toward the lives they each envision.

Joining me on this journey is my esteemed colleague and friend Irene Gutmann – with whom I’ve co-hosted with on her radio show The Coaching Corner (2008-2012), and currently co-host with on our podcast Work Smarter, Not Harder.

In addition to the podcast, beginning 9/20/2022 – I’ll be hosting a series of new, free workshops within the North Rockland Chamber of Commerce, which will show startup and solo business owners how to grow a company, organization or cause.

The topics will be varied. Here is a sampling of some of the topics I will be covering:

• Software Topics
  • Using (Microsoft Word)
  • Using PowerPoint (Presentations)
  • Using QuickBooks (Online Financial Management)
  • Using Excel and Google Sheets (Spreadsheets)
  • Using Canva and Photoshop (Graphics)
  • Using Promo and Premiere (Video)
  • Advanced Zoom (Meetings)
    
• Business Topics
  • Creating Policies & Procedures Manual
  • Cutting Company Costs
  • Using QuickBooks Online
  • Pricing Strategies for 2023
    
• Professional Sales – Strategies & Tactics
  • Using a CRM
  • Creating referral pipelines
  • Generating Leads
  • Using Sales Scripts
  • Creating Compelling Offers
  • Closing rates (Initial and follow up)
  • Increasing Frequency of Purchase by Customers
  • Reactivating Former Customers
    
• Digital Marketing (2023)
  • The basics: Website, business cards, and a nice shirt.
  • Creating a Market Dominating Position
  • Fostering Trust, Expertise, Education
  • Bundling Your Services
  • Drip campaigns
  • Publicity and PR
  • Building an Online Company

The first workshop will be at the Stony Point Pancake Factory, Tuesday Sept 20 at 7:45 am, hosted by the North Rockland Chamber of Commerce.

I hope you’ll join us on this journey. You have my word I will endeavor to make it fun, useful and valuable.

Are you ready for your free book?

In 2016 I wrote a book called “How to Program Your Life”, which outlined essential steps to starting, growing and running a business. It’s still available on Amazon for $9.99.

But I’d like to give it to you for free.

It’s not the perfect book. But it’s chock full of wisdom and stories from the first part of my journey as a serial entrepreneur, from 2007 to 2016. I hope you will enjoy it.

If you want to learn more after you read the book, feel free to contact us, and we’ll give you more cool things to help you grow in your professional journey. After all – that’s where the fun is.

Click here to get the book How to Program Your Life, as well as an additional free offer.

A few months ago, we posted a bunch of domains that we own that we don’t want anymore. We bought them over 10 years’ time, on a set of random whims.

We landed on RocklandNews.com about 2 years ago, so in addition to our web design and maintenance divisions, our 2-year strong news company is keeping up very busy!

So – if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, or a business/organization that needs a better domain name, perhaps we have something for you that will help.

There’s a ton of available domains. A lot of good names we’ve picked up over the years. But hey — we can’t develop everything. As Clint Eastwood said, we gotta know our limitations. So we’re putting them on AFTERNIC.com.

You can still pick one up! Visit our AfterNIC.com profile to view available domains!

Start your business with the right domain name!

Below is the list of domains, with their retail appraisal value according to GoDaddy.com. Obviously, that’s the so-called retail price. You can get the domains for a more affordable amount. Especially if you’re a local company, organization or cause in Rockland County, NY.

If you are interested in any of these domains, please contact us and we can get you connected with a representative from AFTERNIC. You can make a qualified minimum bid, below retail.