Add clients to MainWP - what for? what's your use case and value of it?

[markus998 (Markus)]

Are you actually using the feature to manage the clients within MainWP?

I never paid much attention to it, because there are many tools where you can manage client information, e.g. invoicing software, documentation tools like Notion or Confluence, an actual CRM, etc.

So I wonder if you manage the client information within MainWP what’s the value you get from it?

Till now I could not really see it. Am I really adding CRM-like notes about the client into MainWP? Not sure about that and interested how you use it

[SunfireWeb (Connie Hill)]

From my understanding, this is useful when utilizing the Reports options, as you can set up the reports to be mailed directly to your clients with some of their information filled in.

I only briefly explored the Reports tool, but that is what I had noticed was a use case for adding Clients into one’s MainWP Dashboard.

[markus998 (Markus)]

ah yes that could be it … I never looked into the report. I have not seen one tool that creates actually good (useful) reports, and in particular about MainWP I haven’t heard good things, but it’s true, that could be one of the reasons

[zackw (Zack)]

No I wouldn’t bother with it as a replacement for a CRM. But as mentioned, it’s useful to populate data into the reports.
Also it’s useful if you have clients that own many websites, since you can link each site to the same owner and be able to filter to them.

[kgourlay (Kenneth)]

Ninety percent of my clients have exactly one site, and so I’ve never seen any benefit in filling in client information in MainWP. But I do have one client who has about ten sites, and when I (recently) started using the Pro Reports extension this was a convenient way to group all their reports together. Beyond reporting, I can imagine a use case where it’s nice to be able to filter sites by client in the case when a client might have more than one site, but as I intimated that’s an edge case for me. I definitely never considered it to be a CRM, more like a tag in order to identify sites as related.

[markus998 (Markus)]

I can see how it’s a use case here

Overall I am not sure what I should think about the reports at all. On the one hand we should make our work transparent. On the other hand, I don’t know how it’s for you, but I think my clients could not care less about PHP version, current theme, amount of plugin updates, etc. - if they are interested in reports it would be more about marketing efforts and analytics

I am debating myself a lot about the reports overall - if costs and time invest are low for those reports it might be worth it. What’s your experience with it so far?

[kgourlay (Kenneth)]

I definitely think my clients probably don’t care much about PHP version, current theme, etc. either. Some are interested in new posts and pages. But mostly I think the monthly report is a conversation starter and a reminder that they are actually getting a service from us.

In terms of conversation, reports (for better or for worse) prompt questions about what is going on with their website. This could be good or bad, depending on your perspective. For me, I think it’s good because I believe that part of my mission is to spread knowledge about good website practices. These questions give me a chance to do that. It also increases the recognition these clients have of the value they are receiving.

In terms of a reminder, clients get a monthly email listing all the things we did for them. (At least that’s how I see it. And of course, reports can be customized to suit your preferences.) This helps retention, I would think, since clients (particularly the ones who wouldn’t be paying attention otherwise) are less likely to leave if they see all the work they would have to do without our management and support.

I have only been using pro reports for a few months, and it does leave some things to be desired, but I like the idea of the reports, and his has saved me time for at least one client that requested a monthly summary of what changes were made on the website. Before using pro reports I had to send this email by hand, so this alone was a big win.

[markus998 (Markus)]

I agree with many things you say, or perhaps even everything you say. It’s a conversation starter and reminder. That’s the only reason why I am thinking about it and some time ago I tried the same already with ManageWP.

I personally also think it makes a difference if it’s clearly an automated report or a manual crafted report. Depending on the client, the client might feel forced to look at it and perhaps even respond if it’s obviously a manually crafted report. An automatic report that is sent monthly (or for small clients maybe quarterly) is different. It’s easier to just swipe it away if it’s not the right time without feeling any guilt.

I feel my clients would not care much, many would even get annoyed by it, but in the end me being visible to them might outweight that.

For some reason I remember I have not heard much good about the MainWP reports, but I didn’t dive into those myself yet. However, as it’s the end of the year I am thinking exactly about those things … how visible am I to the client, and to some I am not at all visible until I want to send an invoice. Those kind of clients are very small maintenance clients of course (otherwise there would be more communication). You can’t have 4 checkup meetings a year as this would already fill half of the maintenance plan (for those small clients).

I think I should look into the Pro Reports as well. I even signed up for a competitor trial (instead of MainWP) just to test their reports, but in reality I don’t want to have 2 management platforms of course

[zackw (Zack)]

As a person doing maintenance plans for many years, I can say I wish I had not bothered with reports. Here’s why:

1. Many don’t care, that’s true. A lot of that automated report data leads to no meaningful calls to action, there is nothing to do with it except nod and say “hmmm”. Some clients may be confused if that data is supposed to be telling them something important.

2. If there is no call to action and nothing to do, the client may always wonder if they need to be responding or asking things. Some clients will reply back to the report just to say thanks.

3. Let’s say you are asked about those mundain details, like "when did we switch to PHP 7.2? Do you really think anybody is going to go look up a pile of all the previous individual PDF reports and hunt for when the version got switched? Is somebody going to collect all the PDFs and compare the uptime reports and analytics data and so forth? The point is, there is no aggregate data, you can’t just search across reports or get 6 month or year end reports. A bunch of separate PDFs collected over time is a terrible way to store and compare data points.

4. Some clients think they get to control what’s in your reports, personalized just for them. I’ve had clients ask me to add or change things, even change the whole branding of the report to suit their own company branding look and feel! If you’re going to do reports, they have to be generic and suitable for all clients, but not every client needs every detail, so you may go down the rabbit hole of making many template variations for different groups of clients, complicating the whole thing.
   Plus you’ll have to tell people all the time “oh I don’t have a way to insert that kind of data into the report.”

5. I can’t trust tokens. I would never set up a report to automatically send directly to the client. There has been far far too many times the tokens output nothing, or blanks, or 0s, or empty strings, until I figure out what goofed it up and fix it. Some tokens, even those in the official docs, don’t want to work still. Extensions can change, causing tokens to break. 3rd party connections and APIs might have issues, causing output to go blank. So I always download the reports only to myself, check them, then continue from there emailing them manually one by one. This is not very sustainable with growth. It now takes considerable time “assembling” my reports and checking them and emailing them.

6. Because monthly retainers and maintenance almost always involves meaningful work and changes, there are hand-written notes that get added to my reports per-site. Things that cannot be automatically added to the reports within MainWP alone. Let’s say a client was told about an issue in the last report, then we worked on it that month, then in the following month I will report on that work and current status, with the issue being removed from the report once finished.
   This is all manual data added to the report before emailing it.
   If you don’t do it this way, then you are doubling your efforts because you have to both email the MainWP report, but also email or communicate separately about other work and tasks and issues, and notes about that work either will or won’t be in your reports, that’s up to you. It is work to put the notes in the report, it is work to send both in different ways.
   Ideally all the active tasks and work would be communicated, and if this is outside the primary monthly report, then what good is the report really?
   In my brain, I put all that custom work notes in the report so that in the future if they were to open the report from July 2023, it would actually show all the stuff that was done that month, not just the automatic stuff gathered by MainWP.

7. Not a lot of control over the token output. Some of the tokens output the entire HTML structure, so all you can really do is try to style it with CSS. You can develop a highly customized report. And if you can create such a report, I haven’t seen how, which means you have a lot of work to do coding things. There are really no 3rd party report templates out there, we are stuck with just the few MainWP give us.

8. The data in reports is fleeting. I already touched on this, but it’s more true when I add custom work notes in the report. Let’s say I do some work that is really important, a new feature is added or there was a huge troubleshooting problem that was fixed. Hurray! I put all these notes in the October report. Whoops, the client didn’t respond, did they read it? Will they ever read it and know what I did? In the following November report, since I already mentioned all that stuff, I remove those notes, and it’s gone forever, unless they open that last PDF some day.
   This feels bad to me because we’re missing an easy-to-browse changelog of the site. The concept of “something big happened in October” is completely lost because it was placed in the October PDF and sent to one or two email contacts and now it’s essentially gone.
   Maybe you save these notes somewhere else, but that just shows the point that you are doubling your efforts and having to track the same notes in multiple places.

9. I don’t know why it is, but most of my clients drag their feet to ever respond even when they need to. In my reports I have an “issues list” where I keep some ongoing/active issues or list things that need approval or comment from the client before I can proceed. This is why I assume most clients don’t even read the report. I’ve had issues listed for some clients for over a year, despite often reminding them to “be sure to read the report for any monthly issues…” They just don’t make up their mind and approve anything. Is it too hard? Do they not understand? Do they just assume you will automatically fix all issues without consent or approval? They don’t know if approving it will cost extra?
   I don’t like having issues in the report because reports do not remind clients to make a decision, I would have to do that myself, manually, bugging them frequently to tell me what to do about it.
   Far better would be a system, like a ticketing system, where I report on an issue, and then the “system” will bug the client automatically at regular intervals until they decide and approve something.

10. It’s bad for emergencies. If anything major happens, like outgoing email suddenly stops, I’m not going to wait a couple weeks to send the report to notify them. That requires immediately attention. Again this doubles the efforts. I have to reach out to them manually to report the issue and get approval or information needed to fix, and then I have to take notes on all this to put it in the monthly report.
    If I had a singular “system” for tracking issues, whether long term or short term or emergencies or anything else, I would use that, and not try to use the report as a means of assigning tasks and issues to the client, because they just don’t respond to it.

11. Since I actually do list issues in my reports, it means I have to review them all over again each month to make sure they are still active and nobody else fixed it without notifying me. This is extra work, because there is no “system” that forces the client to answer me, to answer for issues.
    Let’s say you have a ticketing system where you report an issue, if the client fixes it and doesn’t tell you, then your system will keep bugging them anyway until they respond and say they already took care of it. So I wouldn’t have to keep reviewing the same issues every month. I just “set it and forget it” until the client deals with it. Monthly reports don’t let me do any of this automation and communication.

12. What good are some of these tokens anyway? For example there should be a token in the SSL extension that shows when the SSL expires. If I assemble my reports dated from the 1st of the month to the last day, and it says the SSL expires on the 8th, and my report is sent on the 2nd, just what exactly is anybody supposed to do with that information? Are they supposed to reply to your report and inform you “hey bub it says the SSL expires on the 8th, can you make sure to handle that?”
    Well of course we monitor SSLs and will make sure it doesn’t expire. I don’t need information to be in the report just for the client to respond back and tell me to watch it!
    Or take something like the token that shows how many media items were uploaded. Sounds kinda harmless, but what’s it for? Is the client going to see 22 listed and ask you to get them a list of all the 22 items that were added? Screw that! lol
    I suppose in some rare case these might matter, like if the report says 2 blog posts were added, but the client was not expecting to publish anything, that might alarm them that something bad happened. It’s never happened before though.
    So I keep asking myself, who cares about most of this data? Which leads to point 13:

13. What do clients really want anyway? They want to:
    a) Know their site is monitored.
    b) Know you are handling issues.
    c) Know as soon as possible if something is wrong and needs their attention.
    d) Know you will recommend improvements if necessary.
    e) Know that what they purchased from you is happened and functioning.
    What do they likely not care about at all? Your PHP version, what the name of the active theme is, how many brute force login attempts were locked out, how many individual plugins were updated, when each backup is taken (hopefully one daily right?). And other stuff.
    The report just acts as a reminder that you are doing stuff. But ultimately what is important is the client wants to know things are found and fixed, and you recommend what can make things better.

---

I’ll close by echoing what others have said. The report acts like a reminder that you are there and “doing things” for them. It’s just a something that tells them you are active.

I think that’s a good thing, we should have some kind of regular communications with clients. But rather than a report as such, perhaps it’s just a reminder email that things are going smooth. For example you could email a report showing that your 20 point check system was followed, or I really don’t know what it could say. “Backups are happening, daily scans are happening, error logs are checked…”

Perhaps instead of a report, you have a phone call every few months to ask how everything is going and see if they have any plans or ideas for the site or anything you could help with.
Or perhaps you set up those MainWP reports, but put a bunch of custom information in it with just a few of the more useful tokens.

But here I am, I have to assemble custom notes, download PDFs individually and merge my notes into the report PDF, check it over and email manually. It’s a pain in the butt, and there is not enough good feedback to prove this is a good system. Clients ignore issues, I can’t get feedback easily, data is lost to time, it’s hard to aggregate or search in, etc.

If you can avoid reports, I think you should. But if you can create some kind of automated monthly mailer that lets the client know you are working for them, this could be good too.

[markus998 (Markus)]

Hey Zack,

pretty amazing things you noted here - worth it to bookmark it. I am a sole proprietor, I started for the first time considering providing client reports about 2 years ago, back then I worked with the Manage WP report (and put a lot of time into it as well, even though it can’t be modified like the MainWP report).

Overall, I planned to send out a quarterly report for the clients whose website I maintain without much personal interaction during the year. That’s those clients that are only charged 0.5 to 1 hour per month + optional hosting + perhaps some licenses. My thought back then (and still valid), I can’t invest time in communication. It’s so little time per year, the time is better invested into the website. In the end for the client it would be better if all time goes into actual work.

However, I doubt it’s best for me, because I am invisible to them in the end. This is not valid for more active clients with larger budgets. There is active communication all the time, they know I am here. I feel in the end, the report is a way to make myself more visible, which is actually only necessary for the low-budget clients / basic-maintenance.

That means, exactly for those clients, the report should not require a lot of time. As you suggested, if it takes a lot of time, it’s probably better to just have a phone call twice a year (even though it feels like lost time that is better invested into the website). Plus each call could lead to questions and it’s not always easy to make a new sub-project out of it, often that’s just a lot of free advice and post-work after the call. For those kind of clients the best option is to increase the budget which won’t work for many. This would allow to invest more time into my own visibility to them, e.g. by providing custom reports, regular meetings even if it’s only twice a year. On the other hand, if completely invisible they might also think “what are you actually doing, my niece runs her own website and it doesn’t require maintenance at all. In fact she created if with AI and it took only 5 minutes”. Losing a client because of that is also not really nice.

Back then the report I crafted was sent exactly one single time, to one single client. It was just too much work to adapt for each client.

I always felt exactly the same as you do, I think. What’s the actual value for the client. I know my clients, and I would guess only if they are super bored they would look at a report. Also the PDF can be a disadvantage, because it requires one more click.

Imagine you get a newsletter per PDF. You would probably not read it. If it’s directly within the email, I might give it a chance to skim it at least.

So with all you say, I fully agree with you. And at the same time I am interested in the reports, just for the sake of being a bit more visible to the client. Sending those monthly would be too much though for those kind of clients.

Overall, I think as you suggested a personal email with some checks, and a summary can be actually of value (but it’s manual work). I also think that analytics data is also of value for the client, but not just analytics data but the interpretation and recommended action because of it (that can’t be included in a 6 to 12 hours per year maintenance plan of course)

We are a bit off-topic, however, I also think it can make a difference if the email sent to the client looks like an email vs. a newsletter. I didn’t do a questionnaire or study and it highly depends on the client, cultural background, education level, preferred way of perceiving information, … but I think a personal email is more intrusive in a way. I personally don’t want to ignore emails that are sent in person to me, and feel I must look at it and reply. That feels different with a newsletter-style email.

e.g. recently I introduced Ninja Firewall and added a captcha to the login page, because most clients are not behind Cloudflare unfortunately. So I sent a bulk email to all those clients, showing and explaining about it, so that they don’t have to worry about the pre-login page with the captcha. I told them I am monitoring it, and will decide based on the results if I keep it.

I am sending this in a newsletter style (Google Workspace comes with such a feature, so no extra actual Newsletter tool is needed).

I believe it’s less intrusive in a way, that they can quickly read it if they want or just swipe it away.

The difficulty overall for me is, on the one hand I want to stay visible, but on the other hand I don’t want to disturb them. In the end, the client should not need to know about many things that’s why they hired me. But it’s also difficult to talk about budget when they don’t know what you are actually doing for them.

It would be all easy if there is full trust - but I think you must earn trust first (and work on it to keep it). The newsletter style informational email could be helpful for that (instead of the report). At least I try to provide actual useful information and not the info about the latest PHP update. I think also, because of the fact that I believe I am less intrusive, I am also more “brave” to actually share information - because I know it’s just a newsletter style, if they are not interested they can just swipe it away.

I think if I want to look for the MainWP report, it must be automatic and reliable (so obviously no playing around with tokens), sent not too often (rather quarterly than monthly), it’s not so important for larger clients because they anyway know more what’s going on behind the scenes, and it should serve to show I am there, I got your back, don’t worry, and WordPress does not just run on auto-update and I am actually working on the site and taking care of it.

Cheers
Markus

[zackw (Zack)]

Yes I think you’re on the right track.

Funny thing about newsletter style. I thought this was a good idea, I could send a newsletter out to all my clients with industry-wide information. For example when Google Universal Analytics was going to expire in July, it was important to notify all my clients that we will need to make sure we migrate to V4. Perfect opportunity to write a bulk newsletter to all clients at once.

When I sent one of my first bulk emails to clients, it was pretty small and basic high level info. For some odd reason, two of the clients unsubscribed. Like WTF?!? They are buying a service from me and I’m sending service information and they unsubscribe?
Of course, if you use a newsletter service, you aren’t really allowed to NOT have an unsubscribe button, so now I’m torn. How do I even communicate with those clients, who are paying for services, but they can unsubscribe? That’s stupid!

I also think you are right about having information directly in the email rather than a PDF attachment. Far more likely they will glance through the email than open an attachment to read it. Especially if they happen to check on their phones.

Again I will stress that the client’s largest need is to be reminded that you exist, and how to contact you about issues (so they don’t forget you exist and why you exist), and also to be informed as soon as possible if they need to handle or approve something that’s wrong.
There is a disconnect between the report (or email or newsletter etc) when it comes to client communications and ticketing.
If my client actually sees their email, and happens to open the PDF, and happen to scroll down to page 2 or 3 and see a new issue, then what? They have to take even more steps to copy that issue text, start a new email back to me, reference the issue, and write their response.
A shortcut is that they can simply reply to the email report itself, but they still have to reference what issue they are responding to and what they want to do about it.
Ideally, I always urge my clients to open tickets, which means they need to send their response to a different email (support@) rather than the email where the reports come from. This is just a lot of work for them.

In a perfect world, I would have an email where issues can be listed in numerical order for all time. Like each new issue get s a new ID so that history can be tracked. The client would see in their email “New Issue #42” front and center and it would then detail the issue, what is needed from the client, and it would have a one-click method to respond to it.
For example, if the issue requires a YES/NO answer, I would literally have yes and no buttons in the email where they could click it and it would immediately respond back into my system their reply which would then notify me that there is a task to do.
If the issue requires gathering additional details, commentary, approval notes, they could click a button to immediate give their full response and necessary data, almost like a custom intake form.
If the response requires approval, such as additional fees required, they could one-click a button to approve the changes in an official way.

In this kind of system, each issue is tracked in a database, in chronological order, with open/closed type statuses, with a record of being approved or denied, communicated about etc, and what the final resolution was. And all this history can be seen at once (not by trying to collect email reports an PDFs, but in a single dashboard of some kind) that lists the full changelog over time.

Sometimes there is not an issue that requires feedback, but simply an issue that cropped up and was also fixed automatically. This also needs reported chronologically with details on the problem and the fix. It just doesn’t need feedback from the client. Even so, it belongs in the changelog and reports to show the client you handled stuff.

Now imagine your client has been with you for 3 years and they want to see all the changes that have been done over time, problems fixed, issues and solutions. They aren’t going to get this overview with a stack of emails and PDFs.
A good tracking system and dashboard would give them that history.

The sad part is that a small site that rarely ever changes and doesn’t have issues regularly, is going to be pretty barren in such a dashboard. This can lead a client to think “what have you been doing then?” So this is an opportunity where you can have a generic sort of report about a 20 point checklist or whatever else can “fill the space” in their history.

All that to say, some kind of ticketing and communication system with a client dashboard, is better than sending manually-edited reports. But if you do have reports, keep them simple and useful and as automated as possible.

[markus998 (Markus)]

@zackw

Of course, if you use a newsletter service, you aren’t really allowed to NOT have an unsubscribe button, so now I’m torn. How do I even communicate with those clients, who are paying for services, but they can unsubscribe? That’s stupid!

Still had your email in my inbox as I wanted to reply. Yes, sometimes I feel some clients do not understand that running a business website is different than running a hobby website. They hire you, because that’s how it’s done. But actually they have no time and interest as they have their own battles to fight. Of course that’s not valid for all, but definitely experienced it often.

The “newsletter style” is more a thing to reduce negative feelings. I see it from myself - I swipe away a newsletter on the go, but a personal message, I might feel even stressed and have the urge to answer. It’s ridiculous and I shouldn’t even have those thoughts - but I guess that’s how it is unless you find the perfect matching clients. Of course clients could swipe away my personal crafted messages with a blink of an eye, I just see it from my own perspective.

–

@zackw

Again I will stress that the client’s largest need is to be reminded that you exist, and how to contact you about issues (so they don’t forget you exist and why you exist), and also to be informed as soon as possible if they need to handle or approve something that’s wrong.

Yes, I agree. The thing is, I personally (and probably many others) love my work. My actual work. Reminding the client that I exist is not part of it.

I thought about it in the past to introduce a ticket system. It’s a good idea but overkill for many I guess. First I need to manage that they separate topics in separate emails and give it a proper subject besides “homepage”. If that goal is reached, I’ll go on thinking about the ticket system

I often in emails give them already a choice where I ask them to pick between a, b, c … so that they only need to add one letter in the email to reply. A button is even better. I do that now with appointments. I don’t send them suggestions of possible appointment, I include it in the email so that they just have to click it and then an actual calendar entry will be automatically created (it’s a feature that comes with Google Workspace Standard I think).

I invested quite some time already in thinking about those reports, but it’s still difficult for myself to see the value in it. It’s going to be a mixture of “I annoy them with it”, “I remind them that I exist”

[wpexpert (Frederic)]

Hi @zackw and @markus998,

For us, we are doing monthly report because we added values to it!
It is a home made solution where we grabbed MainWP data, Google Analytics, Tickets from FreeScout and also broken images and links. The last one is the section with the most success and reply from clients as they can see that something is broken on their site! And when they click on the link in the online report, it opens their site and highlight exactly what is broken, amazing job from our developer.
Also, we don’t send PDF report, we send a link to the online report and they can see previous reports as well.
It looks like something like that:

They love it! We keep in touch with them monthly, bring extra work and clients are happy when they see a report with no issues.
So yes, reports can do a great job but not the ones with MainWP sadly and we found it irreliable when sending it…
My 2 cents.
Fred

[zackw (Zack)]

That is how I would like to do mine as well. I don’t have MainWP automatically send anything. Instead, I download the PDF and add some more data to it, and then send it myself manually one by one. This is because I add the monthly work notes to the PDF, which I can’t do automatically from MainWP. And also because I often have issues with MainWP’s tokens and I want to catch those before it emails.

I would much prefer to have a client portal/dashboard where their data is kept online and they can view all the previous work and notes and reports, rather than hope they are archiving all their PDFs or something.

Can I ask, what tool are you using to check for the broken links/images and suck the data out of? I have lots of tools for that but not really with an API to yank out specific details per site on a specific date.

[wpexpert (Frederic)]

Hi @zackw, we are using in house solution and took us a few months to develop to fix all false alerts. We optimized it with our server so it doesn’t take a lot of resources from our clients servers. None of the solutions publicly available worked properly so that is why we built one… And we don’t have time to offer it to others, sorry but doable if you have a good developer.

We are managing more than 200 websites so automation is the key. That is why we embed tickets to our reports as work clients is all documented on each ticket and they don’t have a choice, if they want support, they must open a ticket.

[kgourlay (Kenneth)]

This is great, thanks for sharing your experience.

One of the popular sections of my reports (which are automated through MainWP Pro Reports) is the analytics. I am using Matomo Analytics, and I am able to show some summary data in the automated report with the MainWP extension. One client at least refers to the monthly report exclusively for analytics and has no interest in logging in to the Matomo dashboard.

[markus998 (Markus)]

It’s interesting overall how much and how hard we try to make it easy for client. It’s a lot of effort in the end, lot’s of thinking, testing, tinkering around.

I am not sure what kind of clients those are for all of you - I am currently mostly looking at clients where I take care of it mostly in the background, i.e. they don’t pay that much - perhaps 10 hours a year

It’s difficult to estimate effort and time investment to the actual output.

For instance, instead of reports, I could spend time on social media to make myself more visible. My gut feeling tells me, client reports are only worth it in the long run, as building up a system that works and is actually useful costs a lot of time in the end (until the “perfect” report comes out)

Sometimes I also think, don’t be so lazy dear client, you get it all to your inbox already, yes there is an additional link to click or PDF to open, but it’s all there. It’s difficult to estimate at which point I am the least intrusive, and when it’s the most convenient.

I think as bigger systems become more convenient (some, not all) that pushes us also to look for convenience. Make it easy. For instance, reserve/buy a ticket for movie theater used to be non existent, then phone call, then online, now smartphone, maybe subscription, next location-dependent, etc. Of course that’s consumer-oriented, and addresses thousand over thousands of people - however, clients are also consumers in the end, as we all are, so we all perhaps look for similar experiences

[wpexpert (Frederic)]

Hi @markus998,

All good points! Well, it took us a few months to implement the full solution but, now, it is live for more than a year and we can see clients reading our reports. How we now? Well, when Google switched to V4, our GA reports broke as we need to reconnect the new GA account which, we didn’t do automatically. We are waiting for clients to contact us. It was a good way to check who is reading, and who is not. As of today, we still have clients reports not connected to GA4 and this is ok, that means they don’t read it but, at least 50% of them do and I can’t count any months where we don’t get a request on it and sell extra services.

TLDR; it pays in the long run. And when you have everything connected in one place, it is so much easier to have an overview of your clients.

The tool we developed will be a game changer for any web design agency with Care Plans but, it will be too expensive ($400/month at least), to offer it to others…

[spadewerk]

Like some others here, I use that Clients area to manage reporting. I am a recent convert to MainWP, and the key reason I switched from ManageWP to MainWP was the ability to heavily customize those report templates. While the bulk of my clients don’t really care about PHP versions and other technical aspects, I work with a lot of non-profits that receive public funding and there needs to be some transparency in where and how money is spent. So, the details are useful for some of that. I have a few different report templates that I call depending on the data required, and that works quite well.

I will say that I liked ManageWP’s Google Analytics integration in their reports a lot better. I tried to fork in better data from GA but was unsuccessful in getting it exactly the way I wanted so I hope this improves over time.

I use a plugin called RankMath for my SEO integrations and was able to fork much of that data into the reporting, however, and that was a game changer. It was a programming hassle though and one that is going to require care over time so I would love to see a dedicated integration someday.