WordPress and Business Intelligence

www.techliminal.com | info@techliminal.comCopyright (c) 2016 Tech Liminal LLC.

WordPress

Business IntelligenceAnca MosoiuEast Bay WordPress MeetupApril 17, 2016

www.techliminal.com

Founder, Tech Liminal

Technology Consultant & Programmer

Corporate, non-profit, small biz clients

Builds and teaches with WordPress

@anca

2

Anca Mosoiu

www.techliminal.com

Tools and techniques

to acquire and transform data

into meaningful and useful information

3

Business Intelligence

for business decision-making

www.techliminal.com

Answer Questions

1. Who are my best customers?

2. How much money have I made this year?

3. What it take to fulfill an order or provide a service?

4. How effective are our marketing campaigns?

5. How well are our systems working?

4

www.techliminal.com

Make Decisions

1. Determine which products to launch, enhance, or cut

2. Add or reduce staff

3. Enter or exit a market

4. Do marketing campaigns

5

Online Publishing System

Application Framework

Friendly tools for non-developers

6

A work and data gathering system

www.techliminal.com

Manage Your Organization, Connect with Customers

Social Conversation

Appointments & Events

ContentInteractive

Forms

Account Management

Contracts & Payments

Commerce Services Delivery

Desktop and Mobile

7

www.techliminal.com 8

Connect data from many different services

www.techliminal.com

Why WordPress?

1. You own your code and data

2. Open source project with focus on User Experience

3. Huge community of local experts (in every locale)

4. Lots of tools available for free or low cost

5. Inexpensive conferences and meet ups

6. Educational resources for the non-technical user

7. Easy hosting (free, cheap, managed)

WordPress: Excel for the 21st Century9

Existing Tools?

10

11

• Reports on users, user meta data

• Configurable in the dashboard (no coding needed)

• Has caching tables for speeded up reporting

WooCommerce Reporting

12

Make Your Own!

13

www.techliminal.com

users

postmeta term_meta

usermeta

posts terms + taxonomies

14

Meta Tables: Simple but…

15

1 user, 34 meta records

WordPress + WooCommerce

Simple to query

16

Meta Tables: but…

17

1 user, 130 meta records

WordPress Multisite + WooCommerce + custom user data

Meta-splosion!

18

230,985 users

6,789,456 user meta records

our queries start to time out!

Efficient Reporting - Make it yours

19

‣ Create reporting / utility tables for faster querying

20

‣ Sync from source tables

21

‣ Adding user meta 1 at a time

22

‣ Keep it updated

‣ cron jobs

‣ save_post hook

‣ update_user hook

‣ “refresh” button

Give control to people who need the data - they’ll keep it cleaner

Display reports using jQuery Tables

23

Or download CSV file for spreadsheet analysis

Summary

‣ Understand your metrics

‣ Learn where the data is

‣ A little SQL

‣ Make it actionable

‣ Leverage third-party services if needed

‣ e.g.Domo

‣ Spreadsheets (Excel, Google, etc)

24

www.techliminal.com

Want More?

One on one Coaching Work with me on your project.

anca@techliminal.com!

Support Groups + Workshops !

Weekly WordPress group 1-3 PM FridaysMeet designers and developers you can work with

!WordPress Accelerators

(4-week sessions start soon)!

http://techliminal.com/calendar

25