But affiliate marketing can also be overwhelming if you don’t know where and how to start. Without the right information and tools, you can end up wasting a lot of time, effort, and resources on unproductive tasks with little to no returns. That’s why we’ve prepared this guide to help. 

We’ll walk you through the basics of affiliate marketing — what it is and how it can benefit you. Next, we’ll touch on why WordPress is such a great platform for affiliates to set up on. Finally, we’ll share tips and tricks to help you attract more customers, so you can optimize your earning potential from Day 1.  

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a business model that benefits both businesses (known as “merchants” in affiliate speak) and publishers (content creators and affiliate marketers). The merchants pay the marketer a commission for each sale or qualified lead that the marketer generates for them.

Merchants pay out the commissions to the affiliates at fixed intervals, usually once a month. 

Affiliate marketing can benefit both merchants and publishers in many ways:

• Additional income/sales at little to no costs. Merchants can increase sales by tying up with content creators without having to spend exorbitant amounts on marketing. Content creators earn commissions by promoting merchant products. 

• Increased exposure. When merchants pair up with publishers, they expand their audience size and vice versa, increasing the potential for more revenue on both sides.

• Passive income. Much of the work involved in affiliate marketing can run automatically in the background using tools. Affiliate marketers can work at their own pace without having to meet pre-determined targets unless they’ve agreed to do so. Merchants also gain access to a new source of revenue that doesn’t require much legwork.

“Affiliate marketing delivers an average of $12 returned for every $1 spent.”

Is affiliate marketing still worth it?

The short answer is yes, given that the affiliate marketing industry is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. It’s expected to be worth an estimated $27780 million by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 9.89%. 

Here’s the long answer :

84% of businesses say that affiliate marketing delivers a better ROI than other marketing channels at an average of $12 returns for every $1 spent. At the same time, you don’t want to put all your eggs into one basket.  

Use affiliate marketing to supplement your marketing campaigns, so you have a wider and more varied reach. Use a combination of organic marketing methods (blogging, social media posting, etc.) for long-term sustainability and paid search ads for quick boosts when needed. Test different marketing methods to find the ones that work the best for you. 

You can tap into a potentially unlimited source of part-time or full-time income as an affiliate marketer. If you’re a small-sized content creator, you want to build influence and a sizable following first through consistent and high-value content creation for your target audience. If you’re a well-known influencer, you have sufficient leverage to tie up with businesses directly if you’re operating within the same or a related niche. 

Why WordPress for Affiliate Marketing?

Forbes rated WordPress the best blogging platform in 2022. But over and above blogging, WordPress is also a powerful content management system (CMS). It has many features that make it especially useful for affiliate marketers and merchants.

This is why WordPress powers over 35 million websites worldwide, making it the most popular CMS today, by far.

WordPress is relatively easy to set up, use, and troubleshoot. Because WordPress is a popular tool and has been around for a long time, there are many resources you can find online in the form of articles, guides, and video content for support. 

You’ll also find an exhaustive range of plugins for all your affiliate marketing needs when you use WordPress. Plugins are tools that extend the functionality of your website. We’ll refer to some useful plugins for affiliate marketing later in this article.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing on WordPress for Affiliates

Here are some of the most important aspects to consider when you’re starting affiliate marketing on WordPress:

1. Choose the right WordPress platform

Make sure you choose the right platform. It’s easy to confuse WordPress.com and WordPress.org. 

WordPress.com is ideal for bloggers who don’t plan to monetize their platform. You can use the free version to set up a basic site, and you don’t have to worry about hosting or managing the site as these get taken care of for you. The free version is limited. To obtain more features, you must upgrade to any paid plans.  

2. Choose a WordPress web hosting provider

The next step is choosing a web hosting provider. Web hosting providers “host” your website so that it’s visible and accessible online. They usually charge a fee for the service, typically payable in monthly or yearly installments.

There are many different web hosting providers available in the market like Bluehost, DreamHost, SiteGround, and Hostgator. The type of hosting needed can vary from person to person based on your needs. In general, you want to look at the following before choosing a web hosting provider:

• Your budget — which is how much you’re willing to pay monthly or yearly to obtain hosting.
• How much space or bandwidth you need for your website — This can increase as the amount of content on your site grows.
• The features you need — All plans usually list what’s included, so you know what to expect when you buy a specific plan. Some bloggers may want to have more than one email account or have a free domain name included, for example.
• Reputation of the hosting provider — It’s a good idea to research reviews online before settling on a web host provider. Look at up-time, technical support, and customer feedback. What did they love? What did they not enjoy as much?

3. Pick a profitable niche for your affiliate marketing WordPress website

To narrow down on a niche, consider what you’re most passionate about and have experience and in-depth knowledge in. Come up with a unique angle that you can bring to the table that no one else has.

Also, analyze how competitive your niche is. It can require more time and effort to rank in search engines for broad and popular niches. Narrowing down your niche can limit your audience to some extent, but it can also help you rank faster on search engines if it’s an in-demand niche that doesn’t have much competition. 

You can find your competitor websites online by searching for sub-topics that are related to your niche. For example, searching for the “best 10 TVs” in the review niche.

Next, carry out keyword research for your niche. Search Engine Journal has a very exhaustive guide on performing keyword research that can help you get started. 

There are both free and paid tools you can use for keyword research. Develop a content plan with a minimum of 30 to 40 blog posts centered on in-demand topics in your niche and incorporate your chosen keywords in your blog content. Google Trends and blog topic generator tools like Answer The Public, and WebFX can help you generate topic headlines and angles for your next blog post.

4. Create high-quality affiliate marketing content that converts

The key to creating high-quality content that converts is knowing what’s popular, relevant, and valuable for your subscribers. One example is doing product reviews, comparisons, and round-ups. 97% of consumers research products online before making a purchase. 

Product reviews are long-form reviews of the products you’re promoting. In product comparisons, you’re reviewing products side-by-side so customers can make sense of their pros and cons stacked up against each other. With product round-ups, you’re listing the top 5, top 10, etc. brands/variants of a product type like a hair dryer so customers can quickly find the best option.

Providing honest and unbiased reviews is critical as they go a long way toward making you a credible and trustworthy resource. Remember to balance both positives and negatives when doing reviews.

Unlike product reviews or round-ups, comparisons can be tricky to manage as you need to show the features side-by-side in a way that’s uncluttered, visually appealing, and easy to understand. A tool like Easy Pricing Tables can make it easy for you to set up comparison tables on WordPress without needing to know coding or design. 

Other types of content that work just as great for affiliate marketing are:

• Resource pages (where you list your favorite resources that you use often)
• Product tutorials
• E-books
• Buyers guides
• Social media posts
• Curated content
• Deals
• Coupons
• Flash sales. 

Also, make use of some of the following tools to help edit and refine your content, so it’s engaging and easy-to-read, and most importantly, search-engine friendly:

• Grammarly — for grammar and spell checks. It also helps you simplify your sentences to make them easy to read. 
• Hemingway App — to check your readability scores. 
• Copyscape — to ensure your content doesn’t too closely match anyone else’s, especially when you’re outsourcing your content writing. Plagiarized content can result in Google penalties.

5. Choose affiliate partners and join affiliate programs

The next step is to decide who to work with for your affiliate program.

If you’re a business, research online for influencers or content creators in the same niche. Review the type of content they’re posting and their engagement. Look for consistency and a voice that’s aligned with your brand’s voice. Also, ask for historical results before formally inviting them to participate in your referral program. 

If you’re a publisher, you can sign up with the business directly or with an affiliate network. Determine whether the program is profitable and whether there is a demand for the products before investing time and effort into it. Some niches have a ton of potential for earning via affiliate marketing – in WordPress, for example, there are numerous high-paying affiliate programs.

A referral network can give you a bigger choice of businesses to work with, but you also have to give away a percentage of your earnings as fees. 

With affiliate marketing tools, it’s become a lot easier for both merchants and publishers to work together in a transparent way that’s also automated. Typically, merchants share what are called “referral links” with marketers. The marketers will then share or embed these links in their blog posts, videos, or social media posts and encourage clicks.

These referral links redirect customers to the merchant’s product sales page or a lead generation page. When a customer proceeds to buy the product, the information gets passed on to the affiliate and the merchants on their respective affiliate dashboards. Affiliates can also use the tools to manage affiliate links, track performance, and discover new revenue opportunities.  

6. Boost conversion rate and drive affiliate sales using tools for WordPress affiliate marketing websites

Once you’ve set up your blog and started creating quality content, it’s time to drive more traffic and generate sales.

Here are some tips to boost traffic and conversion rate on your posts.

Invest in a WordPress SEO plugin

A WordPress SEO plugin will show you gaps in your search engine optimization (SEO) with recommendations. SEO is a process that helps make sure your content is visible to search engines. It also helps potential readers, customers, or leads find your products and services.

Once you install the plugin, it will show you a list of tasks to complete to optimize your content on your WordPress dashboard. Two of the most popular plugins on the market are long-timer Yoast SEO and the fairly new entrant RankMath. 

If you’re starting, you may find Yoast SEO more than adequate for your needs. Experienced marketers usually gravitate towards RankMath for the sheer breadth of features available on the free version alone. 

You’ll find both free and paid versions of both plugins. In either case, you’ll have a wider choice of features when you opt for the paid version.

Create landing and bridge pages for your website

A landing page is the page you’re aiming to direct traffic to, for example, your sales page or your blog page. A bridge page comes before the landing page and is used to warm up your traffic and encourage the sale.

You can use the Landing Page Cat plugin to create professional and attractive-looking landing pages in a matter of minutes. You can then embed the QuizCat plugin in your bridge page to create highly engaging and viral quizzes to generate more traffic and boost your sales. 

Start growing your email list

Paid ads can be an easy method to get a quick boost of traffic. But you also want to look at organic methods, so you have a steady stream of visitors who are organically attracted to your content. Post content regularly and engage frequently with your subscribers on your social media channels. 

Optin Cat is a popular WordPress plugin you can use to generate more subscribers out of blog readers. It has several features like the two-step optins feature, for example, which can help grow your subscriber base by as much as 700%.

Use affiliate tracking tools

The last step is to use affiliate marketing tools. Tools like these can help you track your performance, identify areas for improvement through in-depth content analytics, and optimize your earning potential. 

Affiliate Marketing on WordPress for Businesses

If you’re a business, you can follow the same steps we’ve outlined above to set up your website, with one difference — you’ll be creating an affiliate marketing program for publishers to sign up to. Alternatively, you can even join an affiliate network where the network manages your program for you in exchange for a fee. 

Refer to WPMU DEV’s exhaustive resource to help you set up your own affiliate program on WordPress. 

Bottom Line

Whether you’re a business or a content creator, starting affiliate marketing on WordPress doesn’t have to be complicated or overwhelming. These guidelines can help you set up your affiliate marketing WordPress website successfully and start generating revenue minus the fuss and stress.

The post How to Start Affiliate Marketing Using WordPress appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Pricing tables help your customers make informed buying decisions and give them the information they need to make a purchase right there, on your site.

If you fail to deliver enough information on your products/services’ pricing, customers are forced to go elsewhere to find such information. There they can easily be swayed to a product or service offered by another company, and you’ve lost a sale.

A great pricing table not only keeps customers on your site, but it can also push customers to a higher pricing tier, resulting in a more profitable sale than the customer originally planned to make. Replicate this for a large number of customers, and a bit of effort put into crafting your pricing table can result in a huge influx to your revenue.

It takes a bit of work to nail down the right pricing strategy. It takes even more work to create a pricing table from scratch that looks great and converts. That’s why you need a pricing table plugin for WordPress to do half the work for you.

This post will guide you through building a pricing table that converts, setting an effective pricing strategy, and introduce a few of the best pricing table plugins to use on your WordPress site.

[Click here to skip ahead to the best WordPress pricing table plugins]

Why You Need a Pricing Table

A WordPress pricing table serves multiple purposes. But at the end of the day, the number one thing you want to do is convert viewers into customers. 

The average conversion rate for e-commerce is around 1-2%. This means there will always be a significant amount of your site viewers who don’t convert into sales, and thus significant potential for you to improve your conversion rate and make more sales.

It’s likely to be a similar story whether you’re selling physical products, a service, a SaaS subscription, or anything else. The majority of the visitors to your WordPress site will not make a purchase.

Your job is to give the potential customer enough information about what you’re selling to make a purchase decision and to present that information in a way that’s easy to take in.

A lot of people will even go straight to your pricing page to see how much your product/service costs, especially if they have prior knowledge of your business.

You want to give these customers, who are already advanced in your sales funnel, the smoothest path to validate their decision and make a purchase. Making it hard for them to find out what your product costs creates unnecessary friction.

On top of this, a pricing table serves to passively up-sell customers to more expensive offerings. A comparison table, comparing different pricing tiers and different features in each tier, shows people what they’re missing if they only go for the cheapest option.

This is extremely valuable for maximizing your customers’ lifetime value. Instead of spending precious time and resources trying to convince people to upgrade after their initial purchase, a smart pricing table can convince them to spend more from the outset.

What happens when your pricing table is not good enough

A poor pricing table (or none at all) is driving your customers away. 

There’s a degree of doubt you need to get past when you’re selling things online. If you don’t do a good job of clearing up this doubt for your customers, one of two things will happen.

1. The customer is not confident enough to make a purchase and leaves without spending anything.
2. They go somewhere else to find more information about your pricing and what’s on offer. This usually ends up being a comparison post published by a third party, who recommends other tools, products, or services (not just yours).

Worst case scenario? The customer goes to search for more information and ends up on a comparison post from one of your competitors, where they’re convinced to buy from them and not from you.

On a lesser note, your customers may not be driven away by a lack of information. But if you haven’t optimized your pricing table (or pricing strategy) well enough, these conversions probably default to your cheapest products or services. 

But no matter which way you swing it, an online business without a well-made pricing table is leaking money.

Making Your Pricing Table Work

An effective pricing table for your WordPress website should clearly communicate the information necessary to help your customers make a purchasing decision. It should also subtly push people to purchase your more expensive products or plans, without being too overt.

However, before worrying about the psychology of WordPress pricing tables and increasing your average sale, just make sure your pricing table is clear and easy to digest. The trick is to communicate enough information, but not too much that you trigger analysis paralysis in your customers.

It can be a temptation to list every single minute feature of each plan on your pricing table, to show customers how much they’re getting when they sign up. However, this often leads to a pricing table that is hard to follow. When scrolling down the list, you lose sight of which feature applies to which plan, and it’s hard for someone to quickly scan and assess. Many people today have low attention spans, so cater to that with a concise table.

You should try and stick to the most important information (pricing, billing terms) and the most significant features.

MeetEdgar’s pricing table is a good example of this. There are just a few features listed in the main table, with shared features listed below, in a way that makes the pricing page clean and uncluttered.

If you are going to list a large number of features in your table, a good way to approach it is separating the major details – plan name, price, a summary of each and a call to action (CTA) button – with the comparison of individual features.

Moz does this well. If you want to compare all the small features of each plan (which is necessary with most SEO tools like this), you can click to a more detailed table. However, the pricing shown initially is clear and with few barriers for the customer.

Buffer does the same thing. Their pricing table is super condensed, just showing the most pertinent differences between each plan, and gives the user an option to see a more detailed feature comparison if they wish.

One more effective example is FeedBear, which doesn’t over-complicate things. It simply offers the information on what features are on offer, makes it easy to see how much it is, and closes with a clear and obvious call to action (“Start Free Trial”).

Psychology of Pricing Tables

Don’t you want more people to sign up for your more expensive plans or packages?

There are a couple of small psychological things you can implement in your pricing table to increase your average order value, and highlight more profitable options.

One basic piece of pricing psychology is “charm pricing” – instead of charging $10, charge $9.99. Almost every business uses this tactic. The actual difference is negligible, but in the customer’s mind, $9.99 is cheaper and better value.

Another common thing to see on pricing tables is a “featured” or “most popular” column. 

By doing this, you’re subconsciously pushing the customer towards this option via social proof, putting it in their mind that this is the best value plan.

You know what you’ll notice about these “featured” columns? They’re never the lowest plan. Highlighting your middle plan is an awesome way to encourage people to pay more than the minimum you have on offer.

But wait, don’t you want to push people towards your most expensive option? Not necessarily.

Another sneaky piece of pricing psychology is to add a premium-priced option, which exists mainly to bring down the perceived cost of your middle and lowest plans.

You might have 3 plans – $10, $20 and $30 for example. By introducing the $30 option, it makes the $20 one look cheaper in comparison, as opposed to if $10 and $20 were the only two choices.

If people sign on to the $30 plan, that’s amazing. But the main point of this plan is to make your 2nd tier look like it’s better value, and encourage more people to sign on to this than the lowest tier.

Learn more about how to price your products & services with the right strategy.

Features of the Best Pricing Table Plugins

Let’s look at what separates the best pricing table plugin for WordPress from the others.

These are some features you want to look at when shopping around for a pricing table plugin (of course, you can skip ahead to our advice as well). Some features may be more or less important to you, so use that to pick out the right plugin for your own use.

Pricing – Free or Premium

Hey, we’re talking about pricing, and it’s natural for this to be one of the main things to consider. If you’re on a budget, and you don’t require an extensive feature set, you might look for a free option. There are certainly a good number of free plugins available on WordPress.org – however, as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for, and as your business grows, you may want to invest in a premium option for an expanded feature set and better support.

Code Bloat (or lack thereof)

Slow load speed is the silent killer for websites. Often this is because you have too many complicated plugins with messy code slowing your site down.

This can be all the more damaging for a pricing table plugin. A table with flashy effects and animations is no use if shoppers are clicking away because the page takes too long to load. This is one of the pages on your site that load speed is the most important, so make sure your pricing table plugin goes along with this.

Design & Customization

Ideally, it should be straightforward to edit most of your pricing tables’ design. If you’re looking for a plugin, it means you either don’t have the ability or the time to build a custom-coded pricing table from scratch – or simply don’t see it as worth the investment.

You do, however, want to be able to customize your pricing tables to fit your site’s design, and ensure it looks appealing. So a plugin that is simple to customize (ideally without the need for code, too) is a must.

Fully responsive

Just as your WordPress site needs to cater to mobile and desktop users, so does your pricing page. The standard way rows and columns are laid out horizontally doesn’t lend itself to mobile users, and there’s nothing worse (and nothing easier to fix) than driving mobile users away because your site doesn’t work properly.

Your pricing table plugin should cater to these mobile users with a design that switches up and is responsive depending on device and screen size.

Templates

Along with the ability to tweak design to fit your site, you want a few pre-set templates to start with. This will drastically cut down the time it takes to get your pricing table up and running. A plus if it has templates for different styles of pricing tables, such as comparison tables.

Integrations

Look for an easy integration with your payment gateway. If your flow has unnecessary clicks for your customer to complete their signup/payment, you’re introducing more opportunities for people to drop off. Linking the buttons on your pricing table directly to your payment gateway is a great way to reduce friction.

Also look for integrations with analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and the Facebook Pixel. This will make your audience building and retargeting campaign a lot smoother.

Custom CSS/HTML Functionality

While the best pricing table plugins should make it easy to build a table without code, you still want the ability to customize with CSS or HTML, should the need arise. There may be tiny customizations you want to make, or small conflicts with your theme or other plugins that require an easy fix with a line or two of custom code. Sometimes all you need is a small code snippet to adjust your table’s columns and rows to fit your content.

If this comes up, it’s important that you, your developer, or the plugin’s support team can easily add the code necessary to make your pricing table perfect.

Advanced Add-Ons

While gaudy animations and flashing neon lights are unnecessary for a professional pricing table, there are some advanced features that may make a lot of difference for you.

A pricing toggle, for example, to allow your customers to switch between monthly/yearly pricing, or different currencies. Tooltips (a graphic that shows up with more information when a customer hovers over an element) can also be a very useful feature to have on your pricing table. Easy integration with WordPress page builder tools like Elementor is another nice extra for many site owners.

The Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins

Ready to start earning more revenue with a high-converting, professional pricing table for WordPress? We’ve got you covered.

To make it easy for you, here are the best WordPress pricing table plugins you can get today.

1 – Easy Pricing Tables

The first-ever WordPress plugin that Fatcat Apps built was Easy Pricing Tables – and it’s still going strong today as the best pricing table plugin for WordPress. More than 500,000 users have downloaded the free version on WordPress.org, and many more have made use of the powerful features in Easy Pricing Tables premium.

Easy Pricing Tables is designed to make it super simple to add clean, conversion-optimized pricing tables to your WordPress website. It takes a few minutes to set up a table, by just choosing a template and filling in your plan or product details for each column.

The plugin features 10 professionally-designed table templates (including 3 comparison tables), with most elements customizable in the plugin’s back end. Everything else (such as minor changes to columns and rows) is further customizable with HTML and CSS.

Despite a focus on simplicity, it doesn’t skimp on additional features. The plugin includes tooltips and pricing toggle functionality, as well as smooth integrations with Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads.

Best of all, Easy Pricing Tables is clean and optimized for a fast site. You can add pricing tables seamlessly to your post, using a Gutenberg block. Alternatively, you can use a shortcode to add your pricing table to a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder.

You can try the lite version of the plugin for free on WordPress.org, or get a pro license for access to the features that really move the needle.

2 – Responsive Pricing Table

Responsive Pricing Table is another easy to use WordPress plugin that lets you build a table with minimal fuss and effort.

You build your table by filling out the details for each of your pricing plans, including the title, a short description, price, billing frequency, and a list of features. Then add the URL for your button (or a code snippet to connect it with Stripe/PayPal), and away you go.

The free version has limited design options (you can customize the color styling for each column, which affects the button and subtitle text), however with the premium version you get access to additional design layouts (as well as tooltip support).

Some people may be looking for a little bit more customization from their pricing table plugin, but for a super quick and easy to use option, Responsive Pricing Table fits the bill.

3 – ARPrice

ARPrice is a more powerful WordPress plugin for those who want a little bit more flexibility to customize their design, and make a great-looking table.

The free version has several pre-made templates to choose from, while ARPrice pro has over 300 sample templates you can download and use as a starting point.

It also lets you customize every little part about your pricing tables’ design via their point and click editor. Included in the design editor are 3000+ icons, 900 Google fonts, and unlimited color options.

The premium version comes with advanced features like tooltips, image/media uploads, A/B testing, button styles and hover effects.

This plugin takes a little bit more work to get going than the previous two, however, it’s a good option for people who want to dive deep into customizing their table.

4 – Pricing Table by Supsystic

Pricing Table by Supsystic is another plugin that offers deep customization and feature sets. The free version has 7 templates available, while the pro version has 38 more – all of which can be customized with a drag-and-drop editor.

The plugin also comes packed with advanced features like hover animations, pricing toggles and the ability to import/export tables.

The editor is fully responsive and makes it easy to see how your changes come out on your pricing table.

It has a bit more of a learning curve than some plugins, so if you want a super simple option to build pricing tables in just a few minutes, something like Easy Pricing Tables is a better option. But this plugin is a fine option for those who need deep design flexibility.

5 – CSS3 Responsive WordPress Compare Pricing Tables

This plugin uses CSS3 and HTML code to generate clean pricing tables or comparison tables that won’t slow your site down.

While the back end interface looks a little dated, and takes a little while to figure out, it’s ultimately a very simple way to set up a multi-column pricing table that looks great.

The pricing tables support any HTML code, which you can use to add images and other media into your rows and columns.

2 table styles are available, along with 20 color sets. You can further customize your table’s design with things like featured columns, banners and hover effects.

6 – Pricing Table by PickPlugins

PickPlugins Pricing Tables is a newer entrant in the game, having only been around a couple of years. Regardless, it’s a decent WordPress plugin, with a free and paid version, that makes it pretty easy to add a pricing table to your site.

The plugin features 25 different themes, which are quite a departure from the styles commonly seen from other plugins on this list. These pricing tables have a very minimalist look, which may suit your business better than something more modern and colorful. You can further customize this look with video embeds, background images, Google fonts, and more.

You can spice up your pricing tables with banners and featured columns, and it has a responsive slider feature to work well on mobile.

7 – WRC Pricing Tables

WRC Pricing Tables is a WordPress pricing table plugin for people who want extensive customization options. It lets you set up every little part of your table, including adding tooltips and hover effects. The back end takes a little while to set up, but the payoff is a lot of freedom in how you build your pricing table.

It supports images and videos in the table, including images as the column background (see image below), which is a nice feature.

8 – WP Table Builder

WP Table Builder offers a slightly different solution, for anyone who wants to build something a little different to your standard pricing table.

While you don’t have any table templates to start with, this plugin features a drag and drop builder which lets you get very deep into customizing your table just how you want it. It’s a great solution for comparison tables, particularly for affiliate sites.

Since you have to build a table from scratch, WP Table Builder takes a fair bit longer to set up than a plugin like Easy Pricing Tables does. The payoff, however, is complete freedom to create the table you want.

9 – Go Pricing

Go Pricing is an advanced tool, designed to help you build and deploy unique pricing tables. The visual editor in the back end is quite intuitive and offers a lot of flexibility for designing your columns & layout.

You can start out with one of their 250 demo tables, and customize the design further to fit your pricing page.

Another nice feature is compatibility with Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, and Elementor, making it a great option for users of these page builder tools.

In Summary

There are many factors to consider when choosing the best WordPress pricing table plugin. Design, integrations, templates, and extra add-ons such as tooltips and animations.

The list above is a comprehensive list of the best WordPress plugins available today, free and paid. Check out our recommendations to start building effective pricing tables for your WordPress site today.

The post The 9 Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins in 2022 appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

An email list is one of the most valuable things you can build for your online business. To build an email list for your WordPress website, you need a powerful WordPress email opt-in plugin.

The best opt-in plugin for your WordPress site is going to make building a list and growing your website or blog a lot easier, helping you convert more of your hard-earned visitors into leads or loyal readers.

Read on for the best list building plugins for WordPress available today.

Why You Need an Optin Plugin for Your WordPress Site

An email list is essential if you want to grow an online business. Whether your hustle is a blog, an online store, a SaaS product, or anything else, it pays to have an audience, and a way to contact them.

Once you have a list, you can nurture these people to go from readers to buyers, set up referral programs to further grow your audience, use emails to build social media audiences, ask for reviews and testimonials, and much much more.

It’s one of the reasons email marketing has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent.

Even if you don’t plan to do any email marketing right now, it pays to start growing your list as soon as you have people coming to your website. That way, when you want to start running email marketing campaigns, you have the list, right there ready to go.

Oh, and an email list also increases the value of your business, should you ever want to sell.

To start building your email list, you need a way for your site visitors to sign up to your list. Very few people are going to jump through hoops to find your contact details and ask “can I join your newsletter” (unless your content is really just that good).

Even a simple popup or opt-in form on your site, easily visible, saying “sign up to our newsletter” is a start. 

If you want to get deeper into the game and build your list quicker, you’ll want to start using a variety of different opt-in forms, as well as providing incentives for people to subscribe and using advanced triggers to hit people with personalized opt-ins.

This is where an opt-in form plugin is essential. You need something that has the power you need to maximize the rate you grow your list, before too many viewers leave and never find your website again.

Different Types of Optin Forms

It’s a good idea to use a variety of different opt-in forms on your site, to capture the highest number of visitors to your list as possible. But be careful not to make the number of opt-ins overwhelming.

Your site should be content first – it’s a pretty poor user experience if your site is just a neverending mess of popups and forms, which will translate into fewer visitors.

Here are some different form types and when to use them:

Popup

The classic popup. Done poorly, it’s annoying and will drive people away. But done right, popups are a great way to build your list.

Popups are effective because they’re almost impossible to ignore. Combine that with a stellar reason to subscribe, and a single popup can net a huge increase to your email list.

Just make sure to take the customer experience into account when creating a popup. Use advanced triggers to show it at the right time, and don’t overdo it with popup after popup after popup.

Inline postbox

An inline opt-in form (above, below, or in the middle of your content) is a nice low-friction way to convert site visitors into subscribers. The idea is to combine an opt-in form with great content or a killer lead magnet, to convince people they’ll get value out of signing up.

Inline opt-in forms are not as annoying as a popup or slide in, but this also means it’s not as easy to capture a reader’s attention. So you need to make sure your design stands out, as well as your messaging. A simple “sign up for our newsletter” will only work out if you have truly amazing content. A better idea is to use a lead magnet here – offer visitors additional content for free (related to the content of the page) when they sign up on the opt-in form.

Sidebar optin

Another classic opt-in form is the sidebar opt-in. Like an inline opt-in, this is an unobtrusive, low-friction opt-in form, and a must if your site has a sidebar. It’s unlikely to be super high-converting, but that’s made up for by the fact that your opt-in form is going to be seen by just about every visitor to your site.

Optin bar

Opt-in bars are a step up from inline forms and sidebar opt-ins in terms of catching the eye. A bar at the top of your site, on all your pages, can be a little distracting, but it also captures attention really well. 

Slide-in

A slide-in is like a popup, but less annoying. It’s a good mix of attention-grabbing and keeping your customer experience intact. The opt-in form slides in on the left or right side of the page (usually at the bottom), often with customizable triggers such as page scroll % or time on page before it appears.

Exit intent popup

Exit intent, or exit intervention popups help you capture website viewers who otherwise would have closed your page and never returned.

These popups appear when the viewer takes their mouse cursor outside the browser window as if they are about to close the tab/window. You can use this opportunity to offer a lead magnet or a pitch for something for the viewer to read later if they enter their email.

The 7 Best Optin Plugins for WordPress in 2022

To quickly and easily add any of these kinds of optin forms to your site, you need a powerful WordPress plugin.

Here are 7 popular WordPress list-building plugins out there to do that job for you.

Optin Cat

Optin Cat (our product, which we’re super proud of!) is the best low-cost, lightweight plugin to use to grow your email list.

Optin Cat is made by people who make a living building WordPress websites, so we know what site builders need in an opt-in plugin. You need a plugin with maximum functionality for minimal fuss, which is what Optin Cat is.

All common opt-in form types are super simple to build with Optin Cat – from your popups, inline and sidebar forms, to highly targeted slide-ins, exit intent popups and 2-step optins. Advanced triggering options help you show your opt-in forms to the right people, at the right time.

The best thing about Optin Cat is that it’s easy to use, and lightweight. A lot of opt-in and popup tools slow your site down, and take an age to set up. Site speed and productivity are both vital for site builders, and Optin Cat doesn’t get in your way with either of these two things.

This plugin integrates with a range of popular email marketing tools too, with advanced features for segmenting your list, such as tags and merge fields.

The premium version of Optin Cat is both an affordable and powerful way to start building your email list. If you want a stripped-down version, there are free options available for MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, and Mad Mimi.

Bloom

Bloom, from Elegant Themes, is a powerful opt-in plugin, which lets you create great-looking popups, slide-ins, inline opt-in forms, sidebar opt-ins and more. It comes together with a subscription to Elegant Themes’ other tools, including the Divi page builder.

Bloom forms come with hundreds of design templates, as well as providing the flexibility to customize just about anything about the design yourself.

The targeting options are also top-notch. You’ve got options such as scroll %, time on page and time on site, as well as advanced triggers such as trigger after commenting, after purchasing, on a click, or after a period of inactivity.

It also gives you A/B testing between different designs from the Bloom dashboard.

Bloom does have a bit of a bigger learning curve than a few of the other plugins on this list, which goes hand in hand with a little more power and design flexibility.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is another powerful WordPress opt-in tool, much like Bloom, offering a lot of functionality, with the payoff of a slightly longer learning curve. 

Coming as part of the Thrive Membership, or as a standalone plugin, Thrive Leads allows you to create the following type of forms:

• In-line/in-content
• Lightbox (popup)
• Post footer
• Ribbon (opt-in bar)
• Screen filler
• Scroll mat
• Slide-in
• Sidebar widget

All their forms come with a range of design templates, as well as pretty deep design flexibility.

Thrive Leads offers the triggering options you’d expect from a premium opt-in plugin, such as scroll % and time on page, as well as showing opt-ins just on specific pages, posts and pages, specific categories, etc.

It also comes with extensive A/B testing options. Unlike Bloom, which only lets you test different designs, with Thrive Leads you can test different form types, triggers, and more. Basically, you have full control – if you’re serious about testing everything, you can do this with Thrive Leads.

Popup by Supsystic

If you’re specifically looking to build popups, this plugin is a great way to go. As the name suggests, it specializes in popups, rather than other types of opt-ins like inline or sidebar forms.

The form types you can build with the Popup plugin are pretty damn extensive. They range from your standard email opt-in form or contact forms, to social buttons, popups with video, PDF or iFrame embeds, slide-in lightboxes or notification bars, login screens and age verification screens.

The triggers available are very advanced, including exit intent, inactivity triggers, display after purchase, display after comment, and more. You can also lock content until the user takes an action on the popup, such as verifying their age, signing in, or opting in via email.

This plugin doesn’t have the all-round functionality of others on this list. However, it pays sometimes to specialize, so if you specifically want to build popup opt-in forms, this is one for you.

Convert Pro

Convert Pro – from the same people that make Ultimate Add-ons for Elementor, Ultimate Add-ons for Beaver Builder, and the Astra theme, is a premium and powerful email opt-in plugin.

It gives you a lot of the power of SaaS solutions like OptinMonster and Sumo, but operates as a plugin. This allows you the convenience of being able to set everything up within the WordPress dashboard, and reduces the drain on your site speed (a common problem when using SaaS tools with WordPress).

With Convert Pro you can build popups, slide-ins, info/opt-in bars, inline/after-post opt-in forms, widget & sidebar optins, and full-screen popups. All these form types come with a range of pre-made templates, which can be further customized with a drag and drop design editor.

You’ve also got a range of advanced triggering options such as:

• Specific posts and pages
• Exit intent
• Time on site/page
• User inactivity
• After scroll
• Welcome trigger
• After content

It also comes with the ability to A/B test different designs against one another.

If you need a premium opt-in plugin, without the code bloat of SaaS products, Convert Pro is a great choice.

Icegram

Icegram is a multi-purpose tool that offers all common opt-in form types, plus additional functionality beyond just optins.

As well as building opt-in forms like popups, header/footer bars, inline forms and sidebar optins, you can use Icegram to create call-to-action sections, which drive customers to a page or action of your choice.

For example, instead of a popup that just asks people to opt in to your list, you can create a popup (or sidebar widget, notification bar, etc) that directs people to your shop, or to your latest post.

It’s a great use for online stores, to help promote when you’re running a sale, or to capitalize on abandoned carts.

Icegram of course has all the functionality you want as an email plugin for WordPress, which is why it’s on this list. Its range of design templates and triggering options make it a great plugin to use to build your email list.

Hustle

Hustle, by WPMU Dev, is a powerful email opt-in plugin for WordPress. With Hustle you can build high-converting opt-in forms with flexible targeting options – from exit intent, to returning/new visitors, to visitors from specific countries or referrers. You can customize this to the extent necessary to capture visitors at the right place and time.

Hustle also lets you add social icons and share bars to your site, helping you grow a following beyond just email.

The plugin makes it easy to add inline forms to WordPress posts, using either the classic editor or Gutenberg blocks. It also offers ReCAPTCHA spam protection, adblock detection, analytics, and a wide range of email provider integrations.

Hustle has a free version available, offering a limited number of opt-ins, while to get everything Hustle Pro has to offer, you’ll need to sign up for a WPMU Dev membership at $49/month.

SaaS Tools

As an alternative to a basic WordPress plugin, you can also use SaaS (software as a service) tools to create optin forms and build your list.

The difference between a SaaS tool and a WordPress plugin is, instead of setting everything up within WordPress, you log in to a separate app to create and manage your optin forms. You’ll add forms to your website either by adding code or using another plugin to integrate with the tool.

SaaS apps usually offer a lot of powerful features, since they aren’t restricted by what you can do within WordPress. However, it’s also more common for these tools to slow your site down, because of how they need to communicate between your website and their own servers.

They can also be expensive – often charging a monthly fee, as opposed to many WordPress plugins which just have one yearly license payment.

Two of the most popular SaaS tools for lead generation and list building are OptinMonster and Sumo. Both tools have an extensive feature list, such as high-level targeting options, great-looking templates and customizable design. These tools can be a great way to build your list, but some will prefer the convenience of tools made specifically for WordPress.

How to Choose the Best Optin Plugin for Your WordPress Website

We’ve given you some recommendations above based on experience, but what’s best for one may not be the best for another. If you want to go and shop for the best WordPress optin plugin yourself, here are some key things to look out for.

Form Types

See what kind of opt-in forms the plugin supports. You likely already have an idea in mind for the type of opt-in form you want to build – an inline postbox, or a sidebar opt-in for example. Some plugins only have a few different form types, so make sure the one you want is in there.

More choices is often better – even if you only want one type of form to start with, a larger range of options will give you the flexibility to try out different forms in the future. However, if you are sure you only need one type, you may choose to go with a plugin that specializes in that type of form.

Triggering Options

Opt-in forms can become really powerful when you have the ability to hit the right people at the right time. Highly targeted forms have a much higher conversion rate, naturally. You want to have the flexibility to target users with specific forms based on the content they’re reading, as well as powerful targeting options like exit intent.

Another plus is being able to exclude users – for example, excluding specific pages or categories from being shown your forms, only showing forms to each user once, or only on desktop, to prevent potential negative user experience.

Email Provider Integrations

While most opt-in plugins store your subscribers locally within WordPress, it’s a huge plus to be able to automatically sync the emails you collect with your email marketing tool. Not only does automating this save valuable time spent downloading and uploading CSVs, it also allows you to segment users as they sign up, which can prove incredibly powerful for your email marketing efforts.

For example, you can send a tag, along with name and email, when someone signs up, referring to where they signed up from (which page, category or opt-in form, for example). This lets you add them to a personalized email sequence afterwards, delivering content directly related to their interests.

When you’re shopping for WordPress opt-in plugins, look for a couple of things – first, an integration with the email marketing tool your business/blog uses. Even better if it supports many popular email marketing tools, in case you need to use it for another project, or switch email providers.

Second, look for advanced integration capabilities, such as tags or merge fields. This will make it a lot easier to start extracting value from your email list, by crafting better email marketing campaigns.

Ease of Use

With more advanced features often comes a more extensive learning curve. This can easily be counter-intuitive, leading to you spending far too much time setting up what should be simple opt-in forms.

While there is sometimes a benefit to extensively testing and optimizing your forms, most of the time – particularly in the case of a simple sidebar opt-in or inline postbox – you’re better off building something clean and operational, quickly. That’s why your opt-in plugin should, too, be clean and easy to use. Freeing up your important time to work on tasks that have a higher ROI.

Speed

Finally, a point that is often overlooked, is speed – particularly, how your opt-in forms affect site speed. Many WordPress plugins come with a big downside. They slow your site down, which can end up doing more harm than good.

Page speed is a ranking signal for Google SEO, and may become an even bigger factor with Google’s new Core Web Vitals metric.

Outside of SEO, slow page speed is likely to hurt conversions and time on site from your users, as people are going to be quick to click away if pages are taking forever to load.

One of the most common causes of slow page speed is having 1000s of bloated, inefficient plugins working on your site. While the right plugins can add a lot of value, try to stay away from those that slow your site down – especially with opt-in forms that may be showing on each one of your pages. The best WordPress plugins will give you a range of functionality without draining too many resources.

Best Optin Plugins for WordPress – In Summary

Summing up, building an email list is a super important part of growing your WordPress site. And to start building your list you need to add opt-in forms in places your users are going to see them.

The list above introduces a collection of the best WordPress plugins you can use to start building your list today. My recommendation for the best opt-in plugin, with the best combination of power and simplicity, is Optin Cat. If you need to add clean, high-converting forms or pop ups to your WordPress site in minutes (without unnecessary bells, whistles or code bloat), Optin Cat is the tool for you.

The post 7 Best WordPress Optin Plugins in 2022 appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Not long ago we released Easy Pricing Tables 3.0 – a brand new redesign of our best-selling Easy Pricing Tables WordPress plugin, built with a visual editor that makes desigining and publishing pricing tables a breeze.

We’ve now shipped the first major update to the plugin. Version 3.1 of Easy Pricing Tables features a couple of neat new features to help your pricing tables convert more.

Read on to check out what’s new, and to try it out for yourself, update your plugin or click here to get Easy Pricing Tables Premium now.

Tooltips

You can now add tooltips to your pricing tables with the click of a button. Just hit the “Create tooltip” button on the block toolbar to insert a tooltip in your table.

Enter your text, hit “Insert”, and your done. The tooltip will show as a small question mark (?) icon on the table, showing additional information on hover.

Icon Picker

We’ve also added a handy icon picker, to give you more options for spicing up the design of your pricing tables.

The icon picker features a choice of 700+ icons, all insertable in one click.

These icons are simple HTML, so they won’t slow your site down at all, while at the same time allowing you to make your tables, columns, headings and features stand out a little more.

Both icons and tooltips are available on all versions of Easy Pricing Tables Premium.

Bugfixes, CSS Improvements and Minor Changes

We’ve also shipped a few minor improvements based on the feedback we’ve gotten from our users since release, with the objective being to make Easy Pricing Tables clean, fast and user-friendly for all WordPress users – whether you’re using the block editor, classic editor, page builder plugins, and all kinds of themes.

If you’re noticing any issues preventing you from loving our plugin, be sure to shoot us a support ticket here, so we can check it out.

We’re still hard at work on new improvements for Easy Pricing Tables, as well as our other popular WordPress plugins, so keep your eye on this space for more.

The post Easy Pricing Tables 3.1: New Icon Picker & Tooltips appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Elementor is a great fit for many different businesses and websites. Some build their whole site in Elementor, some only make key pages with this tool – such as a home page, landing pages, or key feature pages.

It’s quite common to use Elementor to create a pixel-perfect, high-converting landing page or pricing page. One where you’re looking to convince the reader of the value you have to offer, and convert them into a customer.

In most cases, this means you’ll want a pricing table on this page, to show the features of your products, plans or services, and give your visitor the last little push to close the sale.

Read on, and we’ll explain how you can build and publish a high-converting and professional-looking pricing table in Elementor.

Advantages of the Easy Pricing Tables Plugin

There are many WordPress pricing table plugins out there today, but none that are as easy, user-friendly, and as well suited to work with Elementor as Easy Pricing Tables.

Easy Pricing Tables is – you guessed it – easy! It’s the best way for someone to build a pricing table with zero coding, little to no knowledge of design, and minimal time to spend on your table.

This is in line with the principles of the Elementor plugin. If you’re using this on your site, it’s most likely because you appreciate the ease of the drag and drop editing process.

Easy Pricing Tables offers the same convenience, with a point and click visual editor to build your tables with. The live editor lets you see how your changes will look in real time, and just about everything – including colors and fonts – can be edited with a single click.

It also comes with the added advantages of a number of pre-built, professionally-designed templates, that help you publish your table that much faster, as well as a one-click WooCommerce integration, for ecommerce sites using WordPress.

Finally, Easy Pricing Tables is designed to make it easy to publish pricing tables in Elementor, and other page builder tools. Not all WordPress plugins function smoothly with page builders – so you want to make sure you choose a plugin that has been designed with tools like Elementor in mind.

Building Your Elementor Pricing Table

The process of building a pricing table and adding it to a page in Elementor could not be much easier.

First, you’ll need to install the Easy Pricing Tables plugin. The Premium version is recommended for the full range of features, as well as all the pre-built templates on offer. However, if you want to try it out for free first, you can do so by downloading the lite version from WordPress.org.

Install and activate the plugin, and you’re ready to go.

Step One: Create a New Table

First, you’ll go to the plugin dashboard to create a new table.

While you can build and publish pricing tables directly in the Gutenberg block editor with Easy Pricing Tables, there is a separate editor if you wish to build pricing tables to be published somewhere else – such as the classic editor, or a page builder.

Find the “Pricing Tables” icon in the sidebar menu, hover over it and hit Add New.

Step Two: Choose Your Template

Choose a pricing table template to start with. If you’re using the premium version of Easy Pricing Table, you’ll have the full range of varied design options to choose from, including a comparison table template.

Step Three: Edit Your Plan, Product or Service Details

Once you’ve chosen your template, just point, click and type to edit your text – pricing, plan names, features and button text.

Try to include only the most important or relevant information in your pricing table – you don’t want to overload your viewers with too many details.

Along with adding text to your Call to Action buttons, add a URL for the button to lead to. This will usually be a checkout page, an Add to Cart URL, or a payment page with something like Stripe or PayPal.

If you’re using WooCommerce (and you have the premium version of Easy Pricing Tables), you can also use the one-click WooCommerce integration to pull the product name and price from your WooCommerce store.

This will fill the CTA button with a link to your WooCommerce checkout page, as well as keeping the pricing table updated as your pricing or product name changes.

Step Four: Customize Your Table Design

Now you can customize the design of your table. The sidebar gives you convenient color pickers and font pickers that will let you edit the majority of how your table looks.

Above the table, the block settings let you format your text, like changing the size, or adding bold/italics/strikethrough text.

Give your table a name to easily identify it, and you’re good to go. Hit “Update” to save your table.

Step Five: Add Your Table to Elementor

Now you are ready to go to the page you want the pricing table to be published on.

In Elementor, choose the Shortcode widget.

From the Easy Pricing Tables plugin dashboard, get the shortcode for your pricing table. Paste this in the shortcode field in Elementor.

Your pricing table should now show up in the page with Elementor. When you’re done editing the rest of your page, go ahead and publish.

How About Other Page Builders?

Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress. However, there are a number of other competing tools, with pretty large user bases of their own.

These include Thrive Architect, Beaver Builder and Divi, to name a few.

So, will the same process work for building pricing tables with these tools?

Absolutely!

That’s what makes Easy Pricing Tables so convenient. The standalone visual builder, with simple shortcode publishing, means you can publish tables just about anywhere in WordPress – whether it’s the classic editor, Elementor, Divi or Thrive Architect.

If it supports shortcodes, you’re good.

And how about the Gutenberg block editor, which is being used more and more as a page building tool of its own?

You’re in luck here, as Easy Pricing Tables is actually designed, first and foremost, for the block editor. It’s even easier to build and publish a pricing table this way. Simply insert the Pricing Tables block, edit and customize your table, and publish.

If you want to start building modern, high-converting pricing tables for your own site, try Easy Pricing Tables. The Premium version comes with a 60-day money back guarantee, so there’s no risk to you if it’s not just what you’re after.

The post How to Make a Pricing Table for Elementor with Easy Pricing Tables appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

That’s why a comparison table can benefit so many different types of WordPress sites. Whether you’re selling digital products, physical products, services or promoting affiliate products, you can increase your revenue and conversions with a comparison table.

Building a table is easy with a WordPress comparison table plugin. No matter your experience with building and managing websites, a plugin will make publishing tables significantly easier.

Read on and we’ll walk you through creating a comparison table for your own site.

What is a Comparison Table?

A comparison table presents two or more choices against each other, in a way that makes it easy for someone to compare and make a decision.

There are many ways a comparison can be used. A common way is to compare several different plans or subscription levels. This is a staple of digital product and software companies. The idea is to show potential customers how much additional value they get from each pricing tier, to push people to spend more money.

Physical products can be presented in a comparison table just as well, the same way.

While you can compare two or more of your own offerings against each other, you can also use a comparison table to compare your products or services against those of a competitor, presenting to your readers why yours is the best choice.

Comparison tables are a great tool for affiliate sites as well. This kind of table lets you show a few different products and the pros and cons of each. This makes it easier for people reading the post to make an informed buying decision, resulting in more clickthroughs and more affiliate commissions. 

If you’re in doubt of the effectiveness of comparison tables, just go to the king of conversion rate optimization: Amazon. Amazon makes great use of product comparison tables, just like this:

In simplest terms, comparison tables make shopping and buying easier for consumers or potential customers, which is in your best interest, whether you’re running an ecommerce store, a software business or an affiliate site.

Comparison Table Plugin vs Manual Coding

If you want to build a comparison table in WordPress, you can do it one of two ways. You can use a plugin or software tool to generate a table, or do it manually, with HTML and CSS code.

But is a tool really worth paying for, compared to a DIY approach?

Coding a table yourself offers more flexibility over how your table looks and behaves. Plugins may have a restricted template or design layout. Manual coding means you can get the exact look and feel you desire. This flexibility is a selling point for some.

But while complete freedom is a nice thing to have, the reasons to use a plugin will outweigh this advantage for 99% of site owners. Here they are:

Knowledge

First, and most simply, a lot of people simply don’t have the ability to build a table from scratch with code. The output might seem simple enough, but coding is a pretty big learning curve – even HTML and CSS, which is the most basic type of code to learn.

Making sure your table looks good on multiple devices, doesn’t conflict with your theme, and doesn’t have any bugs is even more you have to look out for. This is out of the skill range for most site owners.

Time

Let’s say you are proficient in HTML and CSS, and you can build a table yourself. It still takes time to write code. Is that time best spent writing a comparison table, or doing other, higher-leverage tasks for your business?

There’s a good chance that there are more important things that you can be doing that will provide you with a better return on your time, especially if you’re creating tables for a lot of different pages.

Money

Let’s say you don’t have the ability to create a table yourself, or don’t want to spend the time.

You can hire someone to do this for you, but then you’ll have to pay for their time. And developers aren’t cheap.

So, while you may think building tables with code is better than paying for a premium comparison table plugin, the cost of a developer will probably add up to much more.

If you do it yourself, this still applies. Your time is worth money as well. Think about what you’d consider your hourly rate to be. This is essentially what you’re spending if you take the time to build a table from scratch.

Design

To create a comparison table without the help of a software tool, you not only need to know how to code, you need to know some basic design principles. Writing code may be easy to you, but if you don’t know anything about design, your table won’t be as effective as it could be.

When you use a plugin, you benefit from professionally-designed templates, which not only take away the time and money of coding a table, but designing the table to look great too. 

Best Comparison Table Plugins for WordPress

Quality WordPress plugins save you time, money, and help you build better-looking tables. There are a few really good options out there that are going to elevate your site.

If you’re looking for a WordPress comparison table plugin, here are the best choices:

Easy Pricing Tables

Easy Pricing Tables is our flagship plugin at Fatcat Apps. It was our first premium WordPress plugin, built nearly ten years ago, and has had several facelifts since, to make it a great tool to build comparison tables (and other styles of pricing table).

This plugin saves a ton of time and effort, compared to manually coding tables or paying for a developer. You can create and publish a table in just a few minutes, with a professional look and feel, designed to convert into sales or clickthroughs.

Some of the best features of this plugin include:

• Simple color pickers and font pickers to customize your table
• Point and click editing of content
• A one-click WooCommerce integration
• Easy to add affiliate links, shopping cart links or payment gateway links to the comparison table
• Responsive for mobile, desktop and tablet devices

Easy Pricing Tables is built for use with the new block editor, the classic WordPress editor, as well as page builders like Elementor, Thrive Architect and more, so it’s the best fit for just about any kind of WordPress site.

TablePress

TablePress is a free plugin that works great if you need a simple, no-frills comparison table.

This plugin is less for pricing table-style tables, and more for comparing a lot of data. For example, if you have quite a lot of product details you want to compare, such as sizing or technical details.

Let’s say you have a large range of products you want your readers to be able to search for and compare against each other – TablePress is perfect for this.

It’s incredibly simple to set up a table in the backend, so don’t worry about needing to know anything at all about coding or web design.

The plugin, being completely free, is fairly simple in the output style. However, there are a number of premium extensions available that allow you to do more with your TablePress comparison tables.

WP Table Builder

This is another comparison table plugin that is great for the simplicity it offers. You can build tables with a drag and drop editor, like you would a page builder like Elementor or Thrive Architect.

You can add several different elements this way, including text, images, buttons, a star rating, or shortcodes/custom HTML code. This lets you add pretty much anything you need to the table. For anything else, there’s a pro add-on with several additional elements.

Customizing the design takes a little time, though there are some pre-built templates you can use to speed this up.

This is a great plugin for affiliate comparison tables, for Amazon affiliate sites or product review sites.

AAWP

One more option is AAWP. This is designed for Amazon affiliates, so it’s not a fit for every site, but if you are using Amazon, it saves you a ton of time and effort.

The best part about this plugin is how it seamlessly integrates with Amazon. You put your Amazon Associates tracking ID in the backend, and a tracking tag is automatically added to button links in your table. You can also pull product details from Amazon automatically – all you need is the product’s ASIN.

Options for styling your table are somewhat limited. You can customize what columns you show, as well as the style of your call to action buttons, but that’s about as far as the design goes.

That’s not a huge problem, as simple is usually best for an affiliate review comparison table anyway.

You’ll add tables to a post via shortcode, which is super simple, and doesn’t slow down your site at all, adding to the simple, uncomplicated nature of this plugin.

How to Create a Comparison Table in the Gutenberg Block Editor with Easy Pricing Tables

Let’s walk through creating a simple comparison table using Easy Pricing Tables.

Note: you will need the premium version of Easy Pricing Tables in order to use the comparison table template.

With this plugin you can build a beautiful, conversion-optimized WordPress comparison table in a fully visual editor. No coding, no shortcodes, you’ll see how your table looks in real time, as you build it.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, open a new post, or go to the post you want to add the table to.

Add a new block, and choose the Pricing Table block.

Choose your layout. Layout 5 is best suited for a comparison table.

Now, you edit your table directly in the post. 

Use the settings above the block to add and remove columns, edit font size and formatting, and designate a “featured” column.

On the sidebar, you can edit your color scheme and font styles.

When you’re done customizing, just publish your changes, and you’ll have a clean and responsive comparison table.

Here’s an example:

Comparison Table Best Practices

Whether it’s for an affiliate site, SaaS business, or anything else, there are some best practices to follow to ensure your comparison table works well, and results in sales, clickthroughs, or whatever your end goal is.

Here are some tips for creating your comparison table.

Don’t compare too many products

If you try to build a comparison table with too many products, it’s going to end up messy, poorly formatted, and hard to follow. Don’t try to compare every single neck pillow sold on Amazon against each other.

Too many products (or services, plans, membership levels) will give your readers choice paralysis, where they have too many things to select from, and end up choosing none. It also makes it hard to compare two specific products, as they may be too far apart on the table.

Go for 5 columns at the most.

Limit to the most important features

If you overload your customers with too much information, it makes it harder for them to make a decision. This is the opposite of what you want. You want to make it easier for them.

Many software businesses in particular make this mistake. They compare each of their plans against each other, and want to showcase just how many features they offer, with a comparison table that doesn’t fit on the customer’s screen.

The result is often that the potential customer is too confused, and goes somewhere else.

Try to include only the most important features of the products, plans, or services you’re comparing. Think about the biggest differences between each plan, and highlight these only.

If you really want to showcase exactly what you get with each plan or product, do so with a separate comparison table a little further down the page. This can work well for SaaS businesses or services. But don’t make the reader absorb all this information before they can make a decision.

Check out the examples from Slack and Kinsta here to see how best to format a pricing page with a full feature comparison table.

Limit text

A table is not the place for walls of text. The worst type of comparison table is one that is completely overloaded and stuffed full of text. It will look awful, and it defeats the purpose of a comparison table: making it easy for readers to digest information and make a decision.

Condense your information as much as possible. Numbers are great. Sentences, not so much.

Have a clear call to action

If you want the reader to take action after making a decision, say so. It could be making a purchase, starting a trial, subscribing to a plan… whatever it is, add a button that clearly tells the reader what to do next.

If you’re selling physical products, you might want a “Buy Now” button.

If it’s a SaaS business with a free trial, your button should say “Start Free Trial”, or something along these lines.

This helps guide the reader along the purchasing journey – something you need to do to maximize your conversion rate.

Put your preferred choice in the middle

A “featured” or “most popular” column works great in most cases. Generally, potential buyers don’t want to make the complete decision on their own, with no input. That’s why they’re looking at your comparison table, after all.

Giving them a starting point or a little extra push towards one product or one plan is a powerful psychological technique to get more conversions. You’ll want to highlight this column, and also put it somewhere in the middle of your table.

The reason it’s best in the middle is again psychology. Being in the middle draws the focus to it. This will have the customer subconsciously thinking it’s the best choice, and highlighting it as “featured” or “most popular” will validate that thought. 

It’s also effective if your columns are ordered from least expensive to most expensive, as most people want to land in the middle. They don’t want the cheapest option, as it seems inferior, but they don’t want to shell out for the most expensive choice either. 

Comparison Table Examples & Use Cases

Here are a few ideas to give you inspiration for your own WordPress comparison table.

As mentioned in an earlier section, Amazon makes use of product comparison tables on many pages. These are a great way to cut down the time customers need to shop around and compare different options, contributing to Amazon’s industry-best conversion rates.

Slack uses a comparison table to show a complete list of their features, and exactly what you get with each plan.

This works because they have a more simplified pricing table at the top of the page, with only the most important details from each subscription level.

Customers can make a decision here, or scroll down to get more information if they want. But they don’t need to digest the whole pricing table before they get to the button to sign up.

WordPress hosting company Kinsta does the same as Slack, providing a simple pricing table, followed by a comprehensive, well-formatted full feature comparison table.

This comparison table is used to compare one company or tool to alternative options. It shows the reasons customers should choose their offering over the competition, in a way that’s easy to follow and digest.

This comparison table does the same thing, in a uniquely formatted fashion. It lists the features they offer, and compares the cost of paying for different tools that provide each of these features.

Finally, Homegrounds gives us a great example of the comparison table in use for affiliate sites. It shows a succinct summary of their recommended products high up the page, with a summary of the features of each and a call to action button, before expanding to a more thorough review of each product further down the page.

WordPress Product Comparison Tables: Final Thoughts

Comparison tables are a powerful tool for many kinds of businesses built on WordPress.

Affiliate sites, software businesses, services, freelancers, and ecommerce stores can all benefit from comparison tables. Whether you want to compare your services vs the competition, show the full feature set of all of your SaaS company’s subscription levels, or generate more clicks for your Amazon affiliate site, a comparison table will help you do it.

Check out Easy Pricing Tables to start building comparison tables for your WordPress site now.

The post How to Create a WordPress Comparison Table appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

This is Easy Pricing Tables version 3. Our most popular WordPress plugin, around for almost 10 years, redesigned for today’s WordPress.

This is not just an update – it’s a full rebuild. That means cleaner code, faster loading, and better compatibility with WordPress 5.0 and above.

For you, that means it’s easier to create a professional, modern pricing table.

Read on to learn about the changes to Easy Pricing Tables, or click here to get started with Easy Pricing Tables Premium.

Built for the Block Editor

Easy Pricing Tables version 3 is built specifically for the block editor. This is a pretty big deal.

The block editor is the future of WordPress. It’s seen big improvements since the release of WordPress 5.0, and we’ll continue to see the same with future versions of WordPress core.

That’s why we decided that Easy Pricing Tables needs to go the same way.

The plugin now works directly in the block editor. To build a pricing table, just add the pricing table block, choose a template, and point and click to edit your table details.

This lets you see your changes in real time, as well as how your table’s going to look with the rest of your page.

The visual editing you get with Easy Pricing Tables 3 will save you a whole lot of time whenever you create a new table.

Backwards Compatibility, Legacy Experience and Support for Non-Block Pages

While the new plugin is built for the block editor, we want to keep support for WordPress users who do not use the block editor.

If you’re a fan of the classic editor, or you’re using page builders (like Elementor) to publish posts, Easy Pricing Tables is still 100% compatible.

You’ve got the option to build pricing tables in a separate, standalone, visual editor. This works for everyone – no matter your theme, or if you have the classic or block editor enabled.

Once you’re done building, just add your pricing table wherever you want with a shortcode.

Additionally, if you’re an existing user of Easy Pricing Tables and are worried about losing your old tables, or the old interface, we’ve thought of you as well.

Your existing tables will still be there – untouched and unchanged. The old pricing table editor is still there as well. When you build new tables, you can keep using this, or use the updated visual editor. It’s totally up to you.

Easy Pricing Tables doesn’t choose a side in the war between users of the block editor, classic editor and page builders. We’re on board with everyone.

New Table Designs

A big part of the update was to introduce some new, fresh designs.

A few of the old templates in Easy Pricing Tables were starting to look out of date in 2021. Now, you’ve got a new selection of professionally-designed, conversion-optimized pricing table layouts.

These tables are made for modern site designs. After all, it’s hard to make sales when your pricing tables look right out of 2011!

1-Click Everything

Editing and customizing your tables is super easy with our new editor.

Just about everything can be customized with a single click, and you’ll see how your changes look right away.

Point, click and type to change your plan or product details. Features, plan names, pricing – everything.

You can add a toggle with a single click now – much quicker and simpler than the toggle feature of the previous Easy Pricing Tables.

There are also color pickers and 15 pre-loaded font styles for you to quickly and easily customize your pricing table, and make it fit seamlessly with your site – no matter your theme or style.

Get Easy Pricing Tables 3.0 Today

If you’re running a service-based business, a physical ecommerce business, if you’re a freelancer, an agency, or anything else that has plans or products to offer, you can benefit from a clean and professional pricing table.

With the new redesign of Easy Pricing Tables, it just got even easier to build and publish pricing tables on your site. Get it now to try it for yourself, and see how Easy Pricing Tables 3 will help you get more sales.

The post Introducing Easy Pricing Tables 3.0 appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

Nearly one quarter of all online stores run on WooCommerce. If your store is built on WordPress, the world’s most popular website building platform (by far), it’s almost certain you’re running WooCommerce.

WooCommerce makes it easy to build the foundation of your online store, like creating and listing products, and taking orders.

However, you may find it a little more complicated to build advanced functionality for your store, especially if you’re new to the WooCommerce platform.

One such case is building a pricing table – for many types of products or services, a pricing table is essential to educate your potential customers, promote your products, and make sales.

Read on, and I’ll walk you through how to create a beautiful and effective WooCommerce pricing table.

Why your WooCommerce site needs a pricing table

To be fair, not every WooCommerce store needs a pricing table.

WooCommerce generates product pages for you, which you can use to display individual products. You can showcase your entire range of products, or separate categories or selections, in an easy-to-follow grid.

This works great if you’ve got a large catalogue. However, in other cases, a pricing table is more suitable.

A pricing table lets customers easily compare the features of several different products, plans or services.

Easily laying out pros and cons, different features, as well as pricing details makes it really easy for your customers to come to a purchasing decision. Meaning more sales.

It also gives you a great opportunity to upsell customers. If someone’s leaning towards a cheaper product, service or subscription tier, you can push them to make a more expensive purchase with a well-made pricing table.

Even sites with a large product range, which would not traditionally use a pricing table, could use a comparison table on individual product pages, to show the advantages for customers should they upgrade to a more expensive product or plan.

The best WooCommerce pricing table plugin

WooCommerce is a good platform on its own. But third-party plugins make it great.

Specifically, you’ll want to use a plugin to create your pricing table on your WooCommerce store.

The best and most reliable WooCommerce pricing table plugin is Easy Pricing Tables. This plugin makes it easy (get it?) to create and format your pricing table. It also features an integration for WooCommerce, to allow you to pull product names, pricing and images to automatically populate your table.

Easy Pricing Tables focuses on speed and usability, making it a great choice for your WooCommerce store.

How to download & install Easy Pricing Tables

Easy Pricing Tables has both free and premium versions available.

To download and install Easy Pricing Tables free, just go to the “plugins” tab on your WordPress dashboard, hit “Add New”, and search for “pricing tables”. Find “Pricing Tables WordPress Plugin – Easy Pricing Tables”.

Hit “Install Now”, then “Activate”.

If you need more advanced functionality, such as pricing toggles, comparison tables, and the full range of layouts, you’ll want to get the premium version of Easy Pricing Tables.

Easy Pricing Tables Premium also features a dedicated WooCommerce integration, which makes it a lot easier to build tables, especially for stores with a lot of products.

To get Easy Pricing Tables premium, purchase a license here.

Once you complete the purchase, you’ll get a download link for the plugin. Click that, and download Easy Pricing Tables premium.

Go back to the plugin tab in your WordPress dashboard. Hit “Add New”, then “Upload Plugin”.

Upload the .zip file you downloaded from the Fatcat Apps website, and activate your plugin.

Building your pricing table

Once you’ve activated the plugin, just go to a post and add the “Pricing Table” block. Choose the layout that works best for you.

Your pricing table will now show up in the post editor:

With this, 90% of the work of building a pricing table is done. Coding a table from scratch takes a long time. With a plugin like Easy Pricing Tables, all the heavy lifting is done for you.

To complete your pricing table, enter the details of your plan, product or service in the pricing table block. You can add or change your pricing, plan names, button text and any features you want to list, with the point and click editor.

You’ll also need to set a link for customers to go to when they click the button on your table (buttons can be disabled under the “Misc settings” on the sidebar).

The sidebar is also where you can customize the design of your table, such as colors, fonts, and additional settings.

WooCommerce integration

You can go to the sidebar to automatically add your WooCommerce products to a column on your pricing table.

Doing this will pull the product name, image, and price, and fill these details in the pricing table.

Linking a column with a product from your WooCommerce catalogue will also link the button text to your checkout page.

A really cool feature is that your pricing table will automatically update when your WooCommerce product does.

That means if you’ve used the WooCommerce integration, whenever you update the product name, pricing, or featured image, your pricing table will update as well.

All in all, you can have a pricing table ready to display, built from the ground up in less than 5 minutes.

No coding necessary, and no upkeep required when you update your products.

Creating a pricing table with WooCommerce Storefront Pricing Tables

Another option to create pricing tables in WooCommerce is with the WooCommerce storefront pricing tables extension.

This lets you create a simple, multi-column pricing table for your WooCommerce products. There’s no coding required, but it does require the use of shortcodes 

Your table will look something like this in the post editor: [pricing_column id=”107″ image=”true” title=”Bronze Membership” features=”Here’s an bronze feature|Here’s another bronze feature”]

This option also automatically updates products as you edit them in your store. Since the table uses your product ID, as long as the ID stays the same, the table will update any time you make changes to your product name, image or price.

You’ll have a few options to customize your table’s design as well:

Be aware that this method requires first the “Storefront Pricing Tables” extension, which you can download from the official WooCommerce site, for a $19 annual license fee.

It also works just with the Storefront theme – the official WooCommerce theme. If you want to use a different theme on your site, you won’t be able to use the pricing tables extension.

Advantages of Easy Pricing Tables

While WooCommerce does offer their own tool to build pricing tables with the Storefront Pricing Tables extension, it’s not the best. There are a few reasons why a third-party plugin like Easy Pricing Tables is a better option, even at a slightly higher price point.

Easy Pricing Tables makes it easier to customize the design of your table. Colors, fonts, text size, and more minor adjustments are very easy to make, and show in real time in the post editor.

Being able to make a toggle to easily switch between two different price segments is super important for subscription businesses, as well as shops that may want to show products in different currencies. Easy Pricing Tables lets you do this.

Setting up the basic elements – such as plan and product details – is a lot quicker too. The point-and-click editor of Easy Pricing Tables is great for this.

While shortcodes are a popular tool for WordPress plugins to display rich design elements, like tables, the truth is that they are not the most user-friendly. Building expansive elements with shortcodes requires you to constantly update and preview the page to see what it looks like live. This can be quite time consuming, especially when needing to make a lot of small changes to your table.

The plugin also offers several professional designs, which are set up to make your WooCommerce pricing table look great, and convert.

You don’t sacrifice any usability with WooCommerce either, due to the seamless integration with your WooCommerce catalogue.

So, by using Easy Pricing Tables on your WooCommerce store, you’ll:

• Build pricing tables faster
• Be able to create better looking and performing pricing tables

It’s a big reason why Easy Pricing Tables has been one of the most popular WordPress pricing table plugins for many years now, generating over a half a million downloads on WordPress.org.

Other options – tiered pricing tables

How about some other options, for slightly different pricing table use cases?

Outside of a traditional multi-product pricing table or comparison table, you may want to build a tiered pricing table.

For example, this would let you show bulk pricing – say, 10% off for 5 or more products, 20% off for 10 or more.

You can set this up with Easy Pricing Tables too, and a little customization.

You could create a pricing table or comparison table showing the different pricing tiers, rather than different products. 

Or, you could create a pricing table with a toggle that shows two different pricing tiers. This is awesome when you want to show tiered pricing at the same time as several different product variations.

Alternatively, if you need more extensive options for a tiered pricing display, you can check out a couple of plugins and extensions that handle tiered pricing tables specifically.

There’s a premium WooCommerce add-on called Tiered Pricing Table for WooCommerce, or a free WordPress plugin called WooCommerce Tiered Price Table, which are both set up for this purpose.

WooCommerce Pricing Table Plugin: In Summary

To sum up, the best way to add a pricing table (or multiple tables) to your WooCommerce site is with a plugin like Easy Pricing Tables.

A pricing table can do wonders for your sales. Pricing tables are useful for educating your customers on different products, plans, or subscription tiers, and what they get out of each one.

They can also be used to up-sell customers to a higher value purchase, by clearly displaying the additional value they’re going to get out of a more expensive product.

For service or subscription businesses, a pricing table is the bare minimum if you want to make sales.

When you use Easy Pricing Tables, you’re getting a plugin that takes away 90% of the heavy lifting involved in coding a pricing table and making it look great. All you need to do is fill it in with the vital details about your product, and fit the color scheme to that of your website.

From installation to publishing, your pricing table will be ready to go, looking beautiful, in under 5 minutes.

About Fatcat Apps

We are Fatcat Apps – designers of the Easy Pricing Tables plugin, as well as multiple other smooth and easy to use WordPress plugins.

Since 2013, we’ve been making plugins for WordPress. Our company’s focus is on creating useful products that solve a problem for WordPress users with minimal fuss.

Whether you need to build a pricing table, add the Facebook Pixel to your site, or create viral quizzes, we’ve got the best tool to do it. Best of all, you know with a Fatcat Apps plugin, it’s going to be super simple and easy to set up, and you’ve got the best support ready to help with anything you need. 

The post How to Create a WooCommerce Pricing Table appeared first on Fatcat Apps.

The Facebook Pixel is a core part of how the Facebook Ads platform works. This is the analytics code that Facebook advertisers use to target certain groups of people with ad campaigns – such as people who previously interacted with their store or made a purchase.

You can’t advertise on Facebook without using the Facebook Pixel. Luckily, if your store is built on WordPress and WooCommerce, integrating the Pixel into your store is extremely easy. You don’t need any programming knowledge at all.

Read on, and we’ll explain just how you can add the Facebook Pixel to your WooCommerce website, as well as how to start using the Pixel and Facebook Ads to grow your sales.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

Do you ever wonder why, as soon as you start looking into a topic online, you automatically start getting ads about that topic in your Facebook feed?

The Facebook Pixel is why.

The Facebook Pixel is what drives Facebook advertising. It lets advertisers show ads to people who have interacted with or visited their site.

It does this with a piece of code, installed on the advertiser’s site. This code tracks the user’s action (such as viewing a page, or clicking an element), and tries to match that to a Facebook profile.

The advertiser can then use this data to send specifically crafted ads, or create a specific audience for ad targeting based on events taken on their site.

Basically, the Facebook Pixel links the Facebook Ads platform with external sites, allowing much deeper targeting and conversion tracking for advertisers.

How Does the Facebook Pixel Match Events to Users?

The exact details of how the Facebook Pixel is able to match an event taking place on your site to a user’s Facebook profile are a little technical. But in simple terms, it basically uses data stored on your browser or device to detect the user’s Facebook profile.

For example, if you’re used to being automatically logged on when you open Facebook, Facebook can probably match your profile to pixel events on another site.

While this may sound a little creepy, it’s really a win-win. Advertisers get to target the right people for their products, and Facebook users only see ads that are likely to be of interest to them.

All this data is heavily encrypted as well, so it’s basically impossible for your data to be leaked, or for advertisers to contact you personally based on Pixel data.

Why the Facebook Pixel is Essential for WooCommerce Stores

Advertisers can reach people based on demographics, interests, life events and more info from their Facebook profiles.

However, a more powerful and accurate method of targeting is to show ads to people who have taken certain actions on your website.

A person who has browsed a few pages on your store, or added an item to their cart but didn’t yet purchase, is much more likely to respond to one of your ads, than a random person who you think fits your audience persona.

The Facebook Pixel lets you do this. You can run what we call “retargeting” ads, targeting users who have interacted with you before, which traditionally have a much lower ad spend per conversion.

The Pixel also allows conversion tracking, which helps Facebook optimize your ad targeting, again lowering ad costs.

This means, when someone clicks on your ad and takes the action you want them to take (such as making a purchase), Facebook’s software can see this. Once you get a decent number of conversions, Facebook will automatically optimize your ads to show to the people who are (based on the Pixel’s data) most likely to result in a conversion.

Read more about Facebook’s ad delivery optimization system.

Highly focused targeting, Facebook conversion tracking and automatic ad optimization are incredibly powerful tools to have, and help you keep ad costs down a lot. It can be the difference between making a profit on your ads or making a loss.

So, for sites that rely on Facebook Ads to drive traffic to their store, using the Facebook Pixel is an absolute must. Even if you don’t plan to yet, it’s a good idea to install the Pixel on your website anyway, so it can start generating data that will help you if you ever do want to run ads.

How to Install the Facebook Pixel on your WooCommerce Store

There are a few ways you can add the Facebook Pixel to your WooCommerce site. 

While the code may look a little intimidating for non-programmers, there are extremely simple methods you can use, that require just a point and click to set up.

Let’s look at your three options now.

Option One: Install Pixel Code Manually

You can set up a manual Facebook Pixel integration by simply pasting a code snippet into the header of your site.

You’ll need to go into Facebook Ads Manager, and find the Events Manager screen. 

(If you’ve never touched Facebook Ads before, you may have to create a business account and a page for your brand first.)

Create your Facebook Pixel first. Give it a name, so you can identify it as the Pixel for your site.

Now Facebook will ask how you want to install the base Pixel code. If you want to do it manually, hit Install code manually.

Copy the base code shown, and paste it into your site’s code, between the <head> tags on any pages you want the Pixel to track.

To easily add it to every page on your site, either add it to your theme, or use a plugin like the Insert Headers and Footers plugin.

This will install the base code – which means the Pixel will track Page View events. To add more events to track, you’ll need to add a new line of code to your Pixel code for each event, or use the Facebook Event Setup Tool to help do this.

Setting up the code manually is not the best option, as it’s easy to make a small mistake in the code, causing your Pixel to not work. It also takes more time to manually add code yourself.

It’s easier to use plugins to add the Pixel to your site and set up events for Facebook conversion tracking on WooCommerce.

Option Two: Facebook for WooCommerce Plugin

Facebook offers a free plugin to connect and install the Pixel on your WooCommerce site. As well as installing the Pixel, this plugin tracks events like Lead, View Content, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout and Purchase.

While this plugin is the official plugin from Facebook, the user reviews are not great, at 2.3 stars out of 5 on WordPress.org.

So, despite being Facebook’s official WooCommerce Facebook Pixel plugin, this is not the best option to install and manage the Pixel for your WooCommerce store.

Option Three: Use a Third-Party Plugin like Pixel Cat

Enter option three – a third-party WordPress plugin built to provide Facebook Pixel integration on WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Pixel Cat does just this. It lets you install the Pixel, build events and set up custom triggers from the plugin dashboard, which takes away all the trickiness of copying and pasting code that often leads to little errors.

It integrates directly with WooCommerce, making it a great choice for e-commerce store owners on WordPress.

To add the Pixel to your site with Pixel Cat, just go to the “plugins” tab in your WordPress dashboard. Hit “Add New”, search “Pixel Cat”, and install and activate the free plugin.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, add your Pixel ID in the main page of the plugin’s dashboard, and hit “Save”.

Testing Your Pixel

Whichever method you choose to install the Facebook Pixel on your site, it’s a good idea to test and check it’s working as intended.

A small thing missing in the code can cause the entire thing to break, which can be a huge pain if you start running traffic to your site, thinking the Pixel has been tracking your users.

Once you’ve added the Pixel to your site, get the Google Chrome Facebook Pixel Helper extension. This is a simple browser extension that shows data about any Facebook Pixels installed and working on the page you’re viewing.

With this, checking your Pixel is very simple. Just go to a page where you want the Pixel to be working. Check the extension – if no Pixel is installed, the icon will be greyed out. Otherwise, it will be light blue, with a number indicating how many events are firing.

Click on the extension to view more details about which events are firing. You’ll usually see “PageView” or “ViewContent” here, to start with.

If you want to track more specific events, such as an event that fires after a time or scroll delay, or something like “Add to Cart” or “Purchase”, you can perform this event yourself, and check it shows up as you intended by clicking the Pixel Helper icon.

How Pixel Cat Integrates with your WooCommerce Store

Pixel Cat’s WooCommerce integration is one of the reasons it offers so much value. This integration saves WooCommerce store owners a ton of time setting up the events you need to grow your store with Facebook Ads.

The integration works with just one click. In the plugin dashboard, go to the E-Commerce tab, and turn on “Track Shopping Events”.

This automatically tracks the events Add To Cart, Add Payment Info, Purchase, View Content, Search, and Add to Wishlist, along with relevant parameters.

Parameters are things like value, currency, and product name. These are particularly important for e-commerce stores, where you may want to retarget users who bought a certain product, or spent a certain amount.

The WooCommerce Facebook Pixel integration from Pixel Cat has two more powerful features for store owners: Advanced Matching and Dynamic Product Feeds.

Advanced Matching

Advanced Matching is a tool that helps match a higher number of Facebook Pixel events to Facebook users.

The Facebook Pixel doesn’t have a 100% success rate matching events to profiles. Whether a user is logged out of Facebook when they performed an event, was on an unfamiliar device, is blocking cookies, or any other reason, there will be a bit of a disparity between the number of events and the number attributed in Facebook.

For example, if you had 100 Add to Cart events, and wanted to retarget all these people with ads, your ads may only reach 70 profiles.

With Advanced Matching, the Pixel searches for additional information or metadata it can use to match events to profiles, resulting in a higher match rate.

Facebook’s help center claims Advanced Matching is proven to increase custom audience sizes, increase the number of attributed conversions, and decrease cost per conversion.

Learn more about Advanced Matching here.

Dynamic Product Feeds

The second advanced feature of Pixel Cat’s Facebook Pixel integration for WooCommerce is enabling product feeds for Dynamic Product Ads.

Dynamic Ads automatically customize your ads for different Facebook users. It uses your product catalog to create a number of variations, and automatically picks the best one to show.

Let’s say you had 15 different products, and wanted to show remarketing ads that promote a different product, based on what the user had looked at in your store.

Instead of needing to set up 15 different ads, Dynamic Ads automatically creates variations, and shows different variations based on data from the Facebook Pixel.

This is both powerful and time saving – all you need to do is add your WooCommerce product catalog link in Pixel Cat, and the plugin does the rest.

Learn more about Dynamic Product Ads.

More Advantages of the Pixel Cat Plugin

Pixel Cat offers a range of other advantages, not limited to the robust WooCommerce integration.

It lets you create custom events, which are a powerful way to enable extremely focused retargeting ads, or track very specific conversion events.

You can also set up events with custom triggers, such as if you wanted it to fire after the user has been on the page for a certain amount of time, or scrolled a certain portion of the page.

Other trigger options include firing events when the user clicks on an element (such as a button), or even just hovers over it.

Pixel Cat also supports multiple Pixels, and has dedicated support, should you need any help getting set up.

How to Utilize the Facebook Pixel with your WooCommerce Store

Wondering how exactly installing the Facebook Pixel can help you grow your WooCommerce store?

It won’t grow your sales by itself. However, setting up the Pixel, along with all the basic shopping events, enables you to do some powerful things with Facebook Ads that will bring in more sales, and allow you to run more profitable ads.

Here are some ways you can utilize the Pixel:

Retargeting

Targeting cold audiences (people who have had no interaction with your business before) is tough and unpredictable. It’s much more effective to target people who know you already.

Retargeting ads are ads that show to people who already took an action on your site, such as viewing a page, adding an item to their cart, or making a purchase.

By tracking events with the Pixel, you can set up retargeting ads to capture additional revenue for your WooCommerce store.

For example, you can retarget people who made a purchase with ads for complementary products from your store.

You could also show ads to people who viewed a product but didn’t make a purchase. Give these people an extra push to buy.

97% of first-time visitors to your site will leave without buying anything. Retargeting ads are a fantastic way to capture a percentage of those people, who otherwise would never see your site again.

Conversion Tracking

Tracking conversions is essential when you run ads. This is the only way you’re able to tell if your ads are having a positive impact.

Without conversion tracking, you could be spending more money on ads than the actual revenue that those ads create.

Setting up conversion events with the Facebook Pixel allows Facebook Ads Manager to report on this data, so you can see exactly what results you’re getting from your ad spend.

Additionally, one of the reasons Facebook Ads are so powerful is the conversion-optimized delivery system.

In simple terms, this means Facebook is able to determine which profiles are most likely to result in a conversion from your ad, based on past results. This leads to significantly better results – more conversions for less money. But it only works if the Facebook Pixel tracks your conversions and reports this data back to Facebook.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences are specific groups of people you can use as targeting groups for your ads.

Very similar to what we talked about with retargeting ads, custom audiences generally produce better results than “cold” audiences built on demographics and interests. 

While you can also create custom audiences with customer lists (like an email list), the Facebook Pixel allows you to build really effective audiences. You could create audiences for existing customers, people who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase yet, or people who had shown an interest in a specific product or product category.

Custom audiences built with the Facebook Pixel let you get super targeted with your ads, and drive the right people back to your WooCommerce store.

Lookalike audiences

An extension of the custom audience is a lookalike audience.

While custom audiences help you get more from existing customers or fans, lookalike audiences are brilliant at increasing your reach, and bringing in new customers.

A lookalike audience uses Facebook’s software to reach people similar to those in your custom audience. This almost always works better than trying to come up with the right demographics, interests and behaviors to target by yourself. Lookalike audiences can result in cost reductions as much as 1/10th the cost of regular cold targeting.

To create a lookalike, just set your custom audience (for example, people who made a purchase from your store), then use that as a base for your lookalike audience. You can choose how broad your lookalike audience should be, as well as layer interest/behavior/demographic targeting on top of the lookalike.

How to Set Up Your First Retargeting Ad

If you haven’t run any Facebook Ads before, setting it up the first time can be daunting. There’s a lot to learn. But it’s worth the investment, as Facebook Ads are vital for driving the traffic your store needs to thrive.

If you’re new, start small. Set up a simple retargeting ad. This is a good way to avoid heavy losses by targeting the wrong audiences, learn the Facebook Ads platform, and drive a nice bump in sales to your WooCommerce site.

Let’s walk through setting up your ad now.

Before You Start: Set Up Business Manager Account & Facebook Page

If you haven’t already, you’ll need some things in place before you start running Facebook Ads.

You’ll want to create a Facebook Business Manager account to manage your ads. Once you’ve got this set up, create an ad account for your business (you can have multiple ad accounts managed inside the same Business Manager account).

Go to business.facebook.com to get started.

You’ll also need a Facebook page for your store. Open the Facebook menu and go to Create > Page to set this up.

You don’t need to add too much to your Facebook page for now, but make sure it looks like your store is a real and trustworthy business.

Now we can move on to setting up your retargeting ad.

Step One: Set Up the Facebook Pixel

First, make sure your Pixel is installed, set up, and firing.

Follow the instructions we laid out earlier to set up the Pixel with Pixel Cat.

Then, make sure the WooCommerce integration is turned on, so you’re automatically tracking shopping events.

It’s best to set the Pixel up early, so it has time to gather data before you start running your ad. Otherwise, it may take a little while before your ads can start to be effective.

Once this is all set up, we can move on to setting up an ad.

Campaign

Now you’ll need to create a Campaign.

Go to Facebook Ads Manager > Campaigns > Create.

The first thing you’ll do when creating your campaign is to select a campaign objective. This is what the goal of your campaign is.

If your ad is meant to drive sales, select Conversions.

After choosing your campaign objective, name your campaign, leave all other settings as they are, and hit Next.

Ad Set

Next up is creating an Ad Set.

One campaign can have multiple ad sets. The ad set covers targeting, as well as settings like budget and placements.

So, if you wanted to test different audiences against each other, you’d test by creating several ad sets.

For this, we’ll just worry about making one ad set. Let’s run through the settings of your ad set.

For the Conversion Event Location, choose Website, as that’s where a conversion (ie a purchase) will take place.

The Budget & Schedule is up to you – choose a budget that you’re comfortable with spending.

The Audience is the most important part here. This is where you’ll choose the people you want to show ads to.

Select Create New Audience. Hit Create New > Custom Audience.

For the audience source, choose Website.

Hit Next.

Include All website visitors, using your Pixel as the source. If you want to refine it further, you could choose People who visited specific web pages, and restrict this to people who viewed product pages, or some other high-intent area of your site.

You can keep the Retention setting as 30 days, increase it, or decrease it, depending on how much traffic you get. This setting means how long people stay in your audience after performing the event. 30 days means you will target people who viewed your site in the last 30 days.

Now, hit Exclude People. Select the Events dropdown, and choose Purchase. 

Keep the retention setting the same.

Name the audience something recognizable, like “retargeting site visitors”, and hit Create Audience.

This will give you an audience of people who viewed your site in the last 30 days, but did not make a purchase in the last 30 days.

You can add more layers on top of that if you wish (such as only targeting men or women, restricting to an age group, or showing ads in certain locations or languages).

If this isn’t relevant, we can move on.

Keep placements as Automatic Placements.

Under Optimization & Delivery, you’ll want to optimize for Conversions.

If the Facbook Pixel doesn’t have enough data yet, you won’t be able to choose this. So you may need to start by optimizing for Landing Page Views.

Once you get some conversions for the Pixel to pick up on, you can edit your ad and change this.

Hit Next to move on.

Ad

The final step is creating your Ad.

One ad set can have many ads. It can also have just one.

You would create more than one ad if you want to test creative elements (such as images or copywriting) against each other, by creating different ads, served to the same audience.

You could also create multiple ads to drive traffic to different products in your WooCommerce store.

Setting up your ad is fairly straightforward. You just need to add media, write something to go with it, and select the destination for when someone clicks on your ad.

Let’s run through it quickly.

Under Identity, select your store’s Facebook page (you can also select an Instagram account, if you have one and want to run ads on Instagram too).

Under Ad Setup, keep it basic with Single Image or Video. Later you may want to experiment with carousel ads, though (this is something you can test with multiple ads).

Under Ad Creative, you’ll add your media and write your copy. Start with a simple single image – choose the best quality image of the product you want to promote.

Write some text to go with your ad. Keep this short and snappy, while conveying a few points that say why the person should buy your product.

For the Destination, select Website, and paste the URL of the product you are promoting.

Finally, choose a Call to Action for your ad. Shop Now should fit for most WooCommerce stores.

Take a look at your ad, double check the copywriting, and hit Publish to finish.

Next Steps

Once your ad is approved, it will start running in accordance with the budget and schedule you’ve set up.

This was a basic walkthrough on how to set up your first ad for your WooCommerce store. Going forward, you’ll want to test different audiences, different creative elements, and promote different products, to see what delivers the best results.

Testing takes a bit more of an investment, but it’s worth it, to increase the effectiveness of your ads.

Testing is the most reliable way to increase the amount of sales you get from your ads, and cut down the money you need to spend to get each sale.

Additionally, make sure you track the cost per conversion you’re getting from your ads. If you’re spending more money per sale than you’re actually making from the sale, you’ll need to change something, otherwise you’ll just lose money in the long run.

Your WooCommerce Facebook Pixel Guide: Summing Up

This has been the complete guide to installing the Facebook Pixel and utilizing Facebook for WooCommerce store owners.

Facebook Ads are a powerful tool for you to grow your WooCommerce store. It takes a bit of time to learn and master, but the platform is one of the best out there for generating new sales and customers.

Whether you’re about to start Facebook Ads now, or considering it in the future, it’s a good idea to get the Facebook Pixel installed and running on your site as soon as possible.

The sooner you get the Pixel installed, the more data it will be able to collect, and the more effective it will be once you decide to start running ads.

The Pixel can seem tricky to get your head around if you look at the code itself, but installing it and getting it set up is simple with a plugin like Pixel Cat.

Pixel Cat takes care of all the complicated code of the Facebook Pixel, so all you need to do is add your Pixel ID and set up which events to track. It takes just minutes to get the Pixel up and running on your WooCommerce site.

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