“It’s a dark and scary world out there,” said Joshua Strebel, CEO of WordPress hosting company Pagely. “People are using Drupal and Joomla!” Laughs and claps roared from a crowd of 250 + WordPress marketing agencies, plugin developers, and designers.
Strebel stepped off the stage as the lights dimmed in the Tempe Mission Palms Conference Room in Phoenix, Arizona. The White Stripes war cry anthem “Seven Nation Army” sounded off as a projector played a video of moving red and white letters spelling out PressNomics 2015.
Names of hosts, personalities, and even sponsored WordPress plugins flashes on the screen before the graphics displayed a Drupal army attacking WordPress allies. Just when things looked bad, the animations showed hosting sites, themes, dev shops, and personalities joining forces for a united WordPress army.
Matt Bowman, Founder and President of Thrive Internet Marketing, flashed a smile as “Allies Win!” flashed on the screen. Matt had traveled to PressNomics on a mission to unleash a secret weapon that will revolutionize the WordPress world forever: a WordPress plugin that puts multiple online marketing analytics right on top of any WordPress dashboard.
SkyStats: The First Plugin To Go Beyond Google Analytics For WordPress
The Plugin has a name. It’s called SkyStats.
“We think that SkyStats can be the first product of a new industry. A sub-industry inside of the WordPress plugin world of other people building these types of multi-purpose dashboards,” says Matt. “Those just don’t exist yet inside WordPress. There is a lot of plugins out there that pull data from one source. But we have not been able to find in our research any plugins that pull from all of these resources.”
Until now.
SkyStats will be the first plugin to display Google Analytics and Facebook Insights right from a WordPress site’s control panel.
SkyStats Updates Will Grow With More Data Integrations
Even after the initial launch, SkyStats’ list of online analytics will continue to grow. Upgrades to add data from Twitter and Google + are already just around the corner.
Aaron Whittaker, The Product Team Leader of SkyStats, also sees data displays from email marketing systems like MailChimp and payment processors like PayPal in SkyStats future.
“Anyone who is interested in the statistics of their site, how many pageviews their getting, how many likes on Facebook, how many followers on Twitter would be interested in this plugin because it makes it very easy to view that information in one place,” says Aaron Whittaker.
That’s kind of related to the idea of the logo which is a bird. It’s a birds-eye view of your statistics.
The Birth of an All-In-One Marketing Dashboard
At last years Thrive camp conference, Matt had heard that not too many small business owners knew how many potential customers were visiting their websites. A study had found that:
- 75% did not use an analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) to measure website performance
- 60% do not feel they have the tools to make sense of their site analytics or take action to resolve issues
This find was staggering and unacceptable for Matt.
Although Thrive Internet Marketing‘s customized reports continue to enable clients to make data driven decisions about their marketing efforts, Matt wanted an accessible summary of online marketing data that anyone could customize and access at anytime.
The idea of SkyStats was born.
“By putting this all in one place we are creating transparency,” says Matt, while wearing a SkyStats shirt with the Matt Mullenweg quote “Technology is best when it brings people together”. “We believe that’s the way it should be if you’re talking about a SEO agency that is being paid to generate traffic and leads.”
When Is SkyStats Coming Out?
WordPress leaders like Jacob Snyder of JupiterCow and Antony Dey of Pagelines have already expressed their excitement about SkyStats’ possibilities. Thrive developers are already entering SkyStats into beta testing and is scheduled to launch SkyStats by next month.
Stay up to date and be the first to know when SkyStats will be available for your WordPress site! Like SkyStats on Facebook or follow SkyStats on Twitter
