Too Much Data

Well hello, my friends. I’m back after a week away with my family out in the Yellowstone and Grand Tetons area.

After fighting all the Delta flight cancellations to get out there (due to the Crowdstrike issue), we made it and had a great week. Also, you may have heard about the geyser explosion in Yellowstone last week. We were right there the day prior and saw it all closed down the day after, but otherwise didn’t see it. That woulda been interesting. 🤪

But, I’m back, caught up on my sleep after a super late night getting back here…. and I’m diving back in. So on that note, let’s light this candle….

Featured This Week

The Core Pages You’ll Need To Build Your Membership Site

In this next video in the series, I’ll go over some of the core pages you’ll need to put together your WordPress membership site.

The Danger Of Too Much Data

The old saying is that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And that is indeed true. Without measurement and basic stats, you’re flying blind.

That said, some people just measure too much. 😇

Getting into a lot of sites like I do, I sometimes find people running services and plugins that measure every thing you could think of. Button tracking, login tracking, tracking individual menu navigation items, event tracking, etc.

There’s also just Google Analytics. I don’t use Google Analytics for a reason. While it is “free”, it is also beefy because it tracks so much stuff. And people end up running big beefy plugins to run it…. all to get Analytics reports that are so full of data that it isn’t even useful.

Most don’t even look at it. 😇 But, damn, they’re going to track it all anyway! Just in case!

These tools can drag on site performance. It can sink a lot of time as you try to figure out little tracker codes on buttons or the like. All to data mine your website and produce reports that you rarely look at.

Plus, if you just drown yourself in data that has no significance to you in practice, it just leads to inaction. Because it is overwhelming. And, if you go looking at the reports from Google Analytics, overwhelm is likely how you’re going to feel.

So, my advice would be to peel it back. You don’t need to track everything. It is OK that you don’t.

Only bother to measure the exact stats which are actionable to you. Ones you’re looking to improve.

Site visitors. Number of optins per week. Sales per week. Things like that. These are the key performance indicators (or KPIs) of your business.

And frankly, if you have more than a handful of KPIs, it makes things complicated. It is usually more effective to have just a handful of KEY statistics and track them on a weekly basis. Even graph them. Then, those are the metrics you specifically focus on to improve.

The rest is noise. It is fluff.

I use Fathom Analytics instead of Google Analytics. It doesn’t track as much as Google does, but that’s a feature! It gives the data you’d actually want and nothing more.

I track sales. I track optins.

But, are you going to see me tracking individual little sales paths around my site? Or putting individual tracker links on buttons so I can see exactly who clicked it? Nope.

I know the internet marketing “gurus” talk about tracking all that stuff… and that’s fine. If you’re actively working to improve those numbers, then sure…. track it. But, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re a poor business owner if you don’t track all those nitty-gritty numbers. It’s OK.

Choose a select set of KPIs that make sense for your business or website. Track and graph them weekly. Then, focus on doing what you need to do to increase those stats.

The power of focus is strong.

This Week In Concierge

Well, last week was a little bit slow in the world of Concierge. And that’s because I was out of town all week. The last summer trip for my family for this year…. this time out to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. Beautiful area.

But, this was also my first trip out where I had somebody else moving some projects forward in my absence. That was kind of nice.

Some of what we’ve been working on last week is:

• Wrapping up some design changes for a client’s website and re-branding
• Building a new offer landing page for a client for a new promotion being pushed out on Thursday (I believe)
• Make some further site design changes to that same site

So, yeah, it was a light week. But, now I’m back and time to light the fire again. And a “thank you” to all of my clients for the patience while I was away. They’re all so understanding, which is awesome. Now that I’m running an agency business, leaving on a trip like that is a bigger deal than it was when all I did was online courses.

WordPress Quick Bits

WordPress 6.6.1 Released. You may have noticed that a new incremental update was pushed out automatically. 6.6.1 fixes a few new bugs in the core as well as the block editor from WordPress. More here if you’re curious.

FluentCRM Editor Issues. Speaking of those block editor issues in WP 6.6, it also affected the editor for FluentCRM. And I know I have a lot of people who are using FluentCRM. So, if your email editor is messed up, just be sure to update to the latest version of the FluentCRM core plugin and it should fix the issue.

Elementor Search. If you’re using Elementor page builder (pro version), you’ve now got access to a new search widget. You can now put in a search form with real-time results, making your search form work kind of like the Google search. Just keep in mind that these kinds of things do have a site performance hit associated with them, so I recommend you use sparingly.

Stripe Acquires Lemon Squeezy. Lemon Squeezy is a cute name, but it is an all-in-one platform for running a SaaS business. And now Stripe (the payment processor) has bought it. Will be interesting to see how things progress.

Google Killing It’s Link Redirect. Google has announced that it will be killing off it’s URL shortener service on August 25, 2025. It has been a slow bleed, though, since you haven’t been able to create new links in about 5 years. But, the goo.gl service will be no more. Another reason I prefer digital sovereignty. 😇

Creating A Video Library On Your Site

I have a Youtube channel. You might as well. And in my case, not all of my Youtube videos actually end up on my site in the form of a regular blog post. So, I’m in the process of building out a video library.

For me, the idea is this:

• Videos listed in their own section of the site, not mixed up with blog posts
• Videos will be merged with the current ONEPass library. Basically, one video library with designations on which are members-only and which are not.
• Videos will have transcripts
• Videos will be searchable and filterable

Whether the videos are hosted on Youtube, Vimeo or Bunny.net, I will be able to centralize them into one library. And I can use Presto Player to customize the player globally across the whole library.

While I don’t have it to show to you quite yet, I thought I’d give the bird’s eye view on how it is being built.

First, the library is being created as a custom post type using Advanced Custom Fields. I am also using ACF to create a few custom fields for videos. Namely…

• Transcript. A WYSIWYG field where I will paste in the video transcript. I use HappyScribe to generate transcripts.
• Video URL. Either the Youtube URL, Vimeo URL, or URL from Bunny.net.
• Duration. A simple text field to show how long the video is.
• Access. A radio button to show whether it is members-only or not.

Lastly, I’ve also used ACF to create a taxonomy called “Series”. If I assign a video to a series, it will then allow me to group videos together and people can watch videos in series. Either public videos like the series I’m doing now on building a membership site… or a course.

To build the template for individual videos on the front-end of the site, I am using Kadence Elements to build out my template. Kadence can also be used to dynamically bring in those custom fields into my template…. and I can even use the Block Visibility plugin to show/hide page elements depending on the value of those custom fields. For instance, if there’s no transcript for the video, I can hide that section of the template.

And then for the library page itself, I am building a grid using WP Grid Builder. This will provide the search and filter options as well as the dynamic grid which will show videos the way I want them to show up.

One little change I may also make is a backup video field for the purposes of digital sovereignty. For instance, what if my Youtube channel gets pulled one day for one reason or the other? Well, if I have a backup video field and back up all my videos to Bunny.net, then I can build in a master switch which would revert my entire video library to Bunny if Youtube stopped working.

If you have any questions about any of this or how to build it on your own site, just hit reply and ask. And, once my video library is ready, I’ll of course tell you about it. 🙂 This is just an organizational change I am making to my content.