What is Business Intelligence, and how can we plan for data and reporting when creating WordPress sites? This is a talk given at the East Bay WordPress meetup, and features sample SQL for creating reporting tables in WordPress.

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Copyright (c) 2016 Tech Liminal LLC.
WordPress
Business Intelligence
Anca Mosoiu
East Bay WordPress Meetup
April 17, 2016

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Founder, Tech Liminal
Technology Consultant & Programmer
Corporate, non-profit, small biz clients
Builds and teaches with WordPress
@anca
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Anca Mosoiu

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Tools and techniques
to acquire and transform data
into meaningful and useful information
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Business Intelligence
for business decision-making

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Answer Questions
1. Who are my best customers?
2. How much money have I made this year?
3. What it take to fulfill an order or provide a service?
4. How effective are our marketing campaigns?
5. How well are our systems working?
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Make Decisions
1. Determine which products to launch, enhance, or
cut
2. Add or reduce staff
3. Enter or exit a market
4. Do marketing campaigns
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6. Online Publishing System
Application Framework
Friendly tools for non-developers
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A work and data gathering system

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Manage Your Organization, Connect with Customers
Social
Conversation
Appointments
& Events
Content
Interactive
Forms
Account
Management
Contracts &
Payments
Commerce Services
Delivery
Desktop and
Mobile
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Connect data from many different services

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Why WordPress?
1. You own your code and data
2. Open source project with focus on User Experience
3. Huge community of local experts (in every locale)
4. Lots of tools available for free or low cost
5. Inexpensive conferences and meet ups
6. Educational resources for the non-technical user
7. Easy hosting (free, cheap, managed)
WordPress: Excel for the 21st Century
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10. Existing Tools?
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• Reports on users, user meta data
• Configurable in the dashboard (no coding
needed)
• Has caching tables for speeded up reporting

12. WooCommerce Reporting
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13. Make Your Own!
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users
postmeta term_meta
usermeta
posts terms + taxonomies
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15. Meta Tables: Simple but…
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1 user, 34 meta records
WordPress +
WooCommerce

16. Simple to query
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17. Meta Tables: but…
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1 user, 130 meta records
WordPress Multisite +
WooCommerce +
custom user data

18. Meta-splosion!
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230,985 users
6,789,456 user meta
records
our queries start to
time out!

19. Efficient Reporting - Make it yours
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‣ Create reporting / utility tables for faster
querying

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‣ Sync from source tables

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‣ Adding user meta 1 at a time

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‣ Keep it updated
‣ cron jobs
‣ save_post hook
‣ update_user hook
‣ “refresh” button
Give control to people who need the data - they’ll keep it cleaner

23. Display reports using jQuery Tables
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Or download CSV file for spreadsheet analysis

24. Summary
‣ Understand your metrics
‣ Learn where the data is
‣ A little SQL
‣ Make it actionable
‣ Leverage third-party services if needed
‣ e.g.Domo
‣ Spreadsheets (Excel, Google, etc)
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Want More?
One on one Coaching
Work with me on your project.
anca@techliminal.com
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Support Groups + Workshops
!
Weekly WordPress group 1-3 PM Fridays
Meet designers and developers you can work with
!
WordPress Accelerators
(4-week sessions start soon)
!
http://techliminal.com/calendar
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