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Data Drives Design. The Proof Is In The Data. Data Over Opinions. Stop wondering how your business is doing. Google Analytics is powerful stuff. Here's how I get my Google Analytics, and how you should too. Spend 10-15 minutes (or 30) a month looking at Audience, Acquisition and Behavior reports.

I asked Amazon Alexa Skills Marketing Employee #1 Dave Isbitski about Alexa Blueprints. What are they? Essentially they're a way to use a free, visual dashboard to create your own Alexa Skill. This is something all businesses should be aware of. What is an Alexa Blueprint? Dave says “one of the things I’m most excited about that has been happening in the last 18 months or so are Alexa Blueprints.” You can go to https://blueprints.amazon.com and create an Alexa Skill in minutes. Blueprints is a visual tool for creating a Skill. Now you can share them and publish them to the Alexa Skills Store for anyone to download and use. This can be a great tool for brands and businesses to connect with customers. So an Alexa Blueprint is a visual tool for creating an Alexa Skill. Brilliant.

You may have previously read some of my blogs about GoDaddy Webhosting. They have an amazing managed migration tool, as well as the ability to spin up development / staging servers, however, the Proof is in the Data, WPEngine has better Uptime and Speed than GoDaddy Managed WordPress. Both solutions are "Managed WordPress" which means you don't need to be a Web Developer or WordPress Developer to manage your webhosting, from set up, to back-ups to staging environments and SSL, it's all taken care of for you. We are solutions providers at Data Driven Design, and the data is starting to tell us after 3-4 years of hosting our clients' websites on GoDaddy Managed WordPress, that it may be time to upgrade to WPEngine. WPEngine costs significantly more, and we're willing to eat that cost for our clients to have a better experience. As a result, I wanted to show all of you out there how to migrate your WordPress sites to WPEngine. I hope this helps! Best, Paul

Attention Marketers and Small Business Owners: the data is overwhelming that you should not bombard users with pop-ups that prompt them for their email addresses upon immediately accessing your website. To many it feels intrusive. They've visited you, and you're already asking them for something. Gross. BUT, there is a web design / digital marketing tactic that the data says works EXTREMELY well, that is non-intrusive. If you've ever been to a website, browsed around for a minute or three, then moved your mouse to close out that browser tab or enter another URL into the address bar, there is a slight chance that you are prompted at that moment - the moment you try to exit the site - for your email address. This, my friends, is called an "Exit Intent" pop-up, and this video shows you how to install one on your WordPress website. Things you'll need: 1. A WordPress Website 2. The Pop-Up Builder Plug-in for WordPress 3. The Gravity Forms Plug-in for WordPress We always say that high school kids can build websites. Why would a small business or mid size brand with a small marketing team pay a professional team like Data Driven Design to do it for them? This is one of the many reasons why. We are thinking about how to help you use data to grow your business and acquire new customers.

The physical act of launching a website is kind of like changing the oil in one's car. It's SUPER EASY if you've done it multiple times, or do it every day, like a Quick Lube place or something. But it can be really intimidating, nerve wracking and even scary if you've never done it before. And just like the possibility that you put the wrong kind of oil in your car, there's always the possibility that you look in the wrong spot for your DNS settings, which most times are hosted in the spot as your domain name, but not all the time.  Case in point, Cloudflare and GoDaddy. Your domain name and maybe even Webhosting, might be with GoDaddy, but your DNS settings might be with Cloudflare. This video explains the how to launch your website if this is in fact your scenario.

In this episode of the Data Driven Daily Tip, I get super passionate about Marketers and Small Business Owners getting into their Google Analytics accounts and understanding what’s happening with their web data to make data driven decisions. While I’ve put out plenty of content in the last few years about what business owners and marketers should look at in Google Analytics (in just 30 minutes a month you can make a huge difference), this Data Driven Daily Tip makes it even easier to check your web data. 1. It’s about how to set up automated email alerts from Google Analytics Web Properties. You can get your web traffic updates sent directly to you. 2. I talk about our new Alexa Skill called Ask Data Driven Design, where you can now just ask Alexa how your web traffic is doing. Now there’s even less of an excuse to know how your website is performing!

What Is Alexa For Business? “While Alexa was started as a Consumer Product, it has evolved into a couple different areas. Business Skills, like the one Data Driven Design has built to allow clients to ask Alexa how their web traffic is doing… Skills that are only available to employees of a particular business. This is what Alexa For Business is.” Alexa For Business gives the IT department of companies a way to manage and control access to a company’s internal only Alexa Skill or suite of Skills to employees that need/want access.

Can An Alexa Skill BE A BUSINESS, or Should It Be An Extension of a Pre-existing Business? From my interview with Amazon Alexa's Chief Evangelist Dave Isbitski It can be either for sure. Interesting Scenarios: 1. Account Linking – businesses can use their existing APIs and accounting systems, etc. to link up with a voice-based Alexa Skill. That’s how something like ordering a Pizza online works. The user already has an account, the user just says it, and the Pizza company with the Alexa Skill just charges through their pre-existing system. 2. Amazon Pay Integration – small businesses can sell things online and use Amazon Pay. Dave adds: “what’s interesting about the Amazon Pay Integration is meeting your customer in the moment. Let’s say I have a podcast about running shoes, and I could say on the podcast “would you like to buy these right now for 50% off on Amazon.” 3. In-Skill Purchasing – Games do this, selling power-ups and turns, etc. “Another interesting example is working maybe with an age demographic that skews higher,” Dave says. “Let’s say your business fields a lot of calls, and it’s a huge cost center for your business, when in fact, if they could just talk to you, that would completely solve it!” Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation for me, happened when Dave started talking about the fact that current data and analytics from websites and mobile devices are only really based around what the brand or business has allowed the customer to do. “The top three things users do in my mobile app are these things. Right, because those are some of the only things you’ve allowed them to do. With Alexa, it’s different, you can get data around what they’re asking you about. For example, you may give your customers 100 different conversation paths. When you see a drop off at a certain point, you know your customers were looking for something that wasn’t there. You learn as you go, and you improve, in a very different way than with web and mobile apps.”

As always, the proof is in the data. Your business will need an Alexa Skill sooner than you think, which is why Data Driven Design is bringing the first ever Voice Conference to Nashville. LEARN HOW TO IMPLEMENT ALEXA SKILLS, GOOGLE HOME ACTIONS AND PODCASTING TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS MORE EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE. 43% – the lift businesses see nine months after launching an Alexa-enabled product 53% - the percent boost businesses see on average almost immediately after incorporating an Alexa Skill into their current product 54% - the percent of professionals surveyed that say they’d use Alexa in the workplace to increase productivity 30,000+ - the number of Alexa Skills globally 50 million+ - the number of smart speaker users in the world; increasing 15% each month Find out more at NashvilleVoiceConference.com

Have you ever scheduled a post in WordPress that didn’t go live? Maybe you were on vacation and scheduled a blog post, and then when you checked, there was a “Missed Schedule” message next to it? It’s happened to me frequently, but not consistently. Basically, it has happened randomly. And thanks to http://dominiquej.com/wordpress-misse… , I finally know why. One of our clients experienced this problem, and after looking into it, we’ve found the solution! Using one of these two plug-ins should do the trick. https://wordpress.org/plugins/schedul… https://github.com/sLaNGjI/wp-missed-… I explain in this audio.