User engagement is something every site owner is concerned with. Once you figure out how to get enough traffic on your website, you need to figure out how to make all of those visitors interact with it. Without that interaction, whether it's subscribing to an email form, taking a survey or even sharing a post on social media, your website as well as your business can't grow.
That's the dilemma GetSiteControl wants to solve for you. GetSiteControl is a suite of applications designed to help you increase engagement on your site in multiple ways. A few examples of the applications, called "widgets", this tool offers include an email form, social sharing buttons and a pop-up contact form. It's essentially an all-in-one tool that replaces a lot of tools you'd typically use for these purposes. In this GetSiteControl review we'll have a closer look at its features.
About GetSiteControl
GetSiteControl was founded in 2014 and was featured on Product Hunt in 2017. It's ran by a small but innovative team of seven people and has been used by sites like Business Insider France, Globo, Web Summit 2018, Yellow Pages Singapore, Bowers & Wilkins and Lamoda. It’s designed with marketers in mind, making it highly intuitive and easy to use. Let's go over its top features before we take a closer look at it in our GetSiteControl review.
Widgets
What you can see above is the Subscribe Widget. It's a pop-up email form you can place in a variety of different places. This includes a modal form (lightbox), a flyby form (left and right) and a "hello" bar (top and bottom). Unfortunately, before/after post forms, inline forms and two-step opt-in forms are not available at this time, so you'll still need to rely on external tools for those.
When you take a look at the intricate settings you can configure with this widget, you begin to realize what it's capable of in terms of lead conversion. This includes the ability to control when the widget is triggered, including after a certain scroll percentage, after a certain amount of time or when a visitor leaves your website (exit intent). Here are a few additional features that'll come in handy:
- Target users based on location, browser, operating system, etc.
- Set up an autoresponder email that sends after a visitor has subscribed.
- Lead visitors to a thank you page.
- Customize colors, fonts, images and animations.
Source: JuralMin / Pixabay.com
The rest of the widgets work in the same or a similar way. They can be displayed in the same locations and have much of the same settings for you to configure. Here's a quick round-up of them:
- Contact Widget - A simple, contact pop-up form that encourages visitors to get in touch with you.
- Promo Widget - A call to action you can showcase as a pop-up to grab visitors' attention.
- Survey Widget - Collect feedback from visitors as soon as they land on your website.
- Follow Widget - A simple way to showcase links to your social accounts anywhere on your website.
- Share Widget - Similar to the Follow Widget, except this one encourages visitors to share your content.
- Chat Widget - Similar to the Contact Widget, except this one triggers a live chat.
Platforms & integrations
Source: Tumisu / Pixabay.com
GetSiteControl is compatible with a variety of different platforms, including WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal, Joomla, Jimdo, Shopify and BigCommerce. It also integrates with over two dozen email marketing service providers, Zapier, HubSpot, Slack, Google Analytics and more. In this GetSiteControl review I'm going to focus on the WordPress components this service offers, starting with the installation process.
Installation & configuration
Your first step should be to create an account at GetSiteControl's website. Upon logging in, the service will provide two ways for you to install the tool on your site. The first is through a simple snippet of JavaScript code you can paste on any page you want the widgets to display on.
Since I'm using WordPress, I can head to the WordPress dashboard and install the plugin available in the WordPress plugin repository. I can even sign right into my account from the WordPress dashboard. You'll still need to create your widgets from GetSiteControl's dashboard, however.
Integrating your account with Google Analytics
The Google Analytics integration allows you to monitor user behavior in a few different ways. First, you can track the number visitors your widget is shown to. Second, you can track the number of visitors who click the Close button on your widget. Third, you can monitor the number of visitors who click the call to action button associated with your widget. Lastly, you'll see an event that counts the number of visitors who click the "Powered by GetSiteControl" logo, which is useful for affiliates.
Knowing how many users have seen your widget versus how many have ignored it versus how many have interacted with it is crucial in marketing campaigns. You have no way of knowing how effective or ineffective your efforts are without this data. All in all, it'll help you optimize your widgets and ultimately become a better marketer. Plus, integrating it with a tool most of you already use is a bonus.
Integrating the GetSiteControl tool with Google Analytics is incredibly simple. All you need to do is go to Site Settings in the Dashboard, and tick the option for it.
Additional integrations
If you want to integrate GetSiteControl with any of the 24+ services the developers have optimized this tool for, head to the Integrations tab, and click the Connect button associated with any of the services you want to integrate. The service's Knowledge Base is filled with articles for all of its integrations if you get stuck.
Creating your first widget
Finally, let's get to the good stuff in this GetSiteControl review. First, let's take a quick look at the Dashboard. If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll notice it provides an overview of all of the activity your widgets have acquired in the last 30 days. The main overview section provides your total views as well as the maximum number of views your plan allows.
The more detailed section features your conversions broken down into each individual widget regardless if you use them or not. Above this is a button labelled "Create Widget", which reveals a drop-down menu featuring all of the widgets you can create. I'm going to be creating a Subscribe Widget for the purposes of this GetSiteControl tutorial.
The GetSiteControl widget builder is divided into six sections:
- Appearance
- Content
- Success Page
- Behavior
- Targeting
- Integrations
Appearance
You can gain a sense of how easy it is to customize widgets in the screenshot I provided at the top of this section. Changing the colors and fonts your form uses takes nothing more than a few simple clicks. You can also choose the animation it uses when it appears. You can even add an image to your widget depending on the display location you choose.
The only piece of criticism I have for this section is the lack of advanced customization settings for fonts. You can either choose between a sans-serif font or a serif font. Alternatively, you can choose the Inherit option to inherit your theme's font settings. Integration with Google Fonts or a larger font library would be great as would the ability to choose different font styles for the heading and body text of a widget.
Content and Success Page
Source: ar130405 / Pixabay.com
These two sections are fairly straightforward. The Content page simply allows you to configure the text that appears on your widget. The Success Page section allows you to configure the message that displays when a visitor takes action on your widget successfully.
More interesting than that, however, is the Final Action setting in this section. It allows you to choose what happens after the fact. You can choose to have no action occur, to close the widget or to redirect users to another URL, such as a Thank You page.
Behavior and Targeting
The Behavior section allows you to control what triggers the widget. Having the widget display as soon as a visitor arrives on your website is the default option, but you can also display it as they're leaving your site, after they've scrolled to a certain point or even after a certain amount of time. You can even choose specific dates to start and stop showing a particular widget, which is a wonderful option for seasonal sales.
In this screenshot, you can see the amount of advanced targeting options you can configure for your widget. You can choose to display a widget on a specific page and target users based on a number of different parameters.
GetSiteControl pricing
GetSiteControl is available for free with limited features. You can add to the number of features you have access to by subscribing to the Plus plan at $19 / month or the Pro plan at $29 / month. What about you? Have you ever used GetSiteControl for user engagement on your website? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
image sources
- Popup Advertisement on Screen: JuralMin / Pixabay.com
- WordPress Gears: Tumisu / Pixabay.com
- Graphic Growth: ar130405 / Pixabay.com
