GetSiteControl Review 2023
GetSiteControl Review Summary
Product Name:
Product Type:
A suite of marketing widgets for your website
Price:
Free/ $19/ $29 (a month per site)
Summary:
High Quality and Easy to use widgets for any website. Great level of third party integrations. Free tier allows enough flexibility to get a feel for what the widgets can offer. I would like to see more choices to customise look.
Rating:
Welcome to SEO Quiz Master, and today we have an ALMOST quiz app!
Today, we are looking at the GetSiteControl review, a suite of marketing widgets that can be integrated into your own website. These work on pretty much any website providers, including: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Weebly, Shopify….I could go on!
They have that side pretty much covered!
As I am using WordPress, this GetSiteControl review with focus specifically on the WordPress use case!
I would imagine that’s fine for most people, as WordPress is by far the most popular website software around right now. I would imagine there is little to no difference in how these apps work from site to site though.
On their Website, GetSiteControl explains their service as:
“ Perfect widgets for your website:
surveys, lead forms, contact forms, live chats, popups, social media buttons......all in one place!”
Perfect, they say! Hmmm...well lets find out about that!
Pretty much anyone that owns a website site could make use of the GetSiteControl suite of widgets, although it is more targeted towards people that have a commercial aspect to what they do.
The whole idea of a lot of these website apps is to increase the engagement of your audience, give them that warm and fluffy feeling. Hopefully, they will be more likely to come back and even order something from you! Conversion rates and creation of opt in leads are a big thing in internet marketing, and this extra engagement is supposed to give yours a boost!
These widgets make it a simple and more attractive option for your website audience to complete actions that help with the marketing of your brand. This ranges from social sharing and following to completing surveys.
On with the GetSiteControl review!!
What does GetSiteControl do?
Well….I suppose...it gives you control…..of your…..site??
My humour is certainly lacking, but let’s hope that the product is not.
I want to go over how these apps work in practical terms for a WordPress website.
The Installation
To start with GetSiteControl, you need to install a script into the code of your website. This is a very simple process, that they describe quite well in this post on their website.
This will then allow you to create and change widgets on GetSiteControl.com, and see real time changes on your website.
You can also just add a plugin for WordPress that does the same thing and would be a much simpler process.
I have to say I like this idea. I use some apps by Thrive Themes, and you need to install each of their services as a seperate application. For me, this is confusing, as some of the funcionality still shows up if you don’t have the particular app installed. For example, I installed Thrive Architect, and already saw some Thrive Leads information on my dashboard. As I wasn’t sure if this would break my site, I added the Thrive Leads plugin just to make sure.
But with GetSiteControl, you don’t have this problem. You install one thing and get access to all the features through that one installation. I wish Thrive Themes could find a more streamlined solution such as this!
The Interface
These days, it’s pretty much a must to make your website add-on applications user friendly. A lot of people in the internet marketing niche would much rather spend time making money than doing such things as coding! Thankfully, GetSiteControl got the memo. The interface and way of designing the different widgets is very user friendly and simple.
If you have used any drag and drop style website design tools, you will be at home here.
For the design process, I never once had to look for instructions, as everything was pretty intuitive and straight forward.
When you first login, you can see straight away the widgets that you have created and whether they are currently active or not. You also have access to some statistics about those widgets, including a statistics page and a response page. The statistics page shows your views and hits on your widget. Also, a map of where the responses have come in from.
The responses page shows any results of the widget. For example, as I am looking into quizzes, I had already made a survey widget. The responses page allows you to view everyone's answers in a chart format and also download the responses if needed.
This page also shows you where you stand regarding the total views allowed on your plan. More on that later!
When you want to create a new widget, you simply drag and drop it from the menu in the top left hand side and start tinkering with it. Like I said, it’s all very slick and easy to use!
The only other notable menu items to talk about would be the “sites” one. Here, you can easily add and take away websites that you would like to use the suite of applications with. This is an automated process and, as long as you have the relevant widget or script on your site, will work straight away.
Under this menu, when you manage your websites, you can choose to add GetSiteControl to your current Google Analytics statistics. This will show up as a set of custom data in the GetSiteControl section category of your Google Analytics dashboard.
Finally, it is a simple process to add your favourite mail autoresponders to the widgets. You usually just paste the API from your preferred service and away you go. These integrations are only available when you are on a paid tier though. The good thing is they seem to have literally every autoresponder under the sun available to connect, from Mad Mimi (yes, there really is a service called that) to my personal favourite SendinBlue. This is great, as I see way too many services which limit their integrations to only a few big boys in the autoresponder world.
On the highest tier, you can add extra users to your account for an extra monthly fee. This would be useful if you are running a business where multiple people need to use the GetSiteControl widgets.
The Pricing
Now is the time to go over the pricing options that you have here for GetSiteControl.
I like how its a “pay for the whole service” type of deal, which is a lot simpler than paying for each individual widget.
Here are the tiers
FREE
1 site
No extra users
50,000 monthly views per site
All widget types
Unlimited widgets
Custom colors
Frequency settings
Scheduling
Real-time statistics
Mobile responsive widgets
Plus -$19 a month (per site used on)
No extra users
500,000 monthly views per site
All Free features
Managing multiple sites
Branding removal
Integrations
Custom images
Targeting
Start triggers
Exit popups
A/B testing
Survey logic and branching
Autoresponder
Pro -$29 a month (per site used on)
Unlimited views
All Plus features
Managing multiple users
User access rights
The ability to add extra users for $9 each
I have to say, that first impressions are that the free option is actually pretty generous. It gives you the ability to try out and play around with the service on your site quite extensively. If you want a basic experience for a small site, this option might even be enough for you.
For those that are thinking to take over the world, the paid options are essential! For example, you get access to A/B testing, so that you can track how different approaches work on your site. This can really help you refine the widgets for best results. This is simply done by cloning a widget and choosing the A/B testing option on both widgets. You can then create a test for these widgets and track the results! This will help you refine your widgets to best suit your audience.
Your surveys can also include branching and logic with the paid tiers, which enables you to come up with a proper set of questions with interlinking capabilities. This is what interests me most, as it makes this widget pretty close to what quiz applications offer for WordPress.
On the whole, the pricing seems pretty decent. Although, there is a lot of competition out there and it will be interesting to think about whether people would go for this over similar services.
I feel that to really dominate their market more, they need to be a lot more lenient on the amount of websites you can use the paid versions on. I would say allow 2 websites for the Plus version, maybe 5 for the Pro. That’s just my opinion though, and we will talk about this more later in the review.
The Actual Widgets!
Survey Widget
My main concern is the survey option, so let’s start with that.
After you have selected the option to make a survey widget, you are presented with this simple and clean interface to tinker with the settings.
There is very little deviation in the design of the survey in terms of looks. You just change the colour and the position of the survey widget placement.
You can choose between options ranging from an unobtrusive question mark on the side of the screen, all the way to a pop up style.
I like the options, it means the survey can be used in a wide variety of situations. When you have a paid account, you can also fine tune the “behaviour” of this survey. Alongside the targeting options, you really can tailor this to what you want. It can be as intrusive or as subtle as you wish, and only seen by people that you deem appropriate (if needs be).
Going back to the design. The difference between this survey widget and most quiz applications, is the fact that you would often expect at least some templates to make the end product more unique to your site. I think whether you like this approach or not, will be a matter of personal choice.
The integrations for the survey widget are also pretty good. You can connect many types of autoresponders (to collect your opt in leads) if you have a paid account. Even free accounts can get email notifications instantly someone takes the survey, or daily/ weekly summaries. This seems decent for a free tier.
Now, the most important part, the content!
I have been very happy with the scope of the free survey widget. You can make a basic survey with multiple questions. There are already templates set up for different questions that could be used in a survey, including welcome pages, thank you pages and different styles of question asking pages.
As well as this, they include templates for the overall style of survey you wish to make. This could be a “How do you rate us?” survery or “How did you learn about our website?”, just to name a few examples. This gives anyone a great starting point to quickly make a wide range of surveys.
There doesn’t seem to be any option to add images, so you are restricted to text only surveys.
I really like the way that GetSiteControl allows you to see the options for the paid tier, but highlight that they aren’t available in the free one that you are using. This is a great idea, as it gives those free users a real look at what they are missing. In the paid tiers you get to tinker further with what they call “skip logic and branching” in your surveys. With these options, you can send users to specific questions depending on previous answers. This feature does give you good scope for making adaptive surveys, but I can’t help but think back to my review of Thrive Quiz Builder. They had a great way of developing branching logic in a mind map way. This makes it much easier to see all of the branches at once and decide if it suits your needs.
One feature that this application has over Thrive Quiz Builder though, is the ability to quickly preview your surveys as you go. You can do this for both mobile and desktop styles.
GetSiteControl have thought of mobile responsiveness in this widget, giving you options such as an “unobtrusive mobile view.” This is available in all of their widgets, not only this one.
The Subscribe and Contact Us Widgets
To keep this review a reasonable length, I will not talk about the integrations, targeting or behaviour parts of the other widgets. This is because they are all the same or incredibly similar. I will only raise this again, if I see something significantly different.
As the name suggests, this widget is one that encourages your audience to use their email to subscribe to your website, newsletter of whatever you decide. The quality of this widget will determine the amount of opt in leads you will get.
As with the last widget, you can choose from a number of placements for the widget on your user’s screen.
Upon completion, you can send the user to a particular page, close the widget or do nothing.
Again, the only real customisation to the design is to change the colour.
The contact us widget is of a similar vein, except the user will be contacting you with a message along with their email.
As well as allowing for users to message you, there is an option to add feedback survey style questions to the bottom too, which is a nice addition.
Follow Me and Share Widgets
This widget has the same placement options mentioned previously. This widget encourages your website visitors to follow you on social networks. What I like about this, is the wide variety of social networks available. I have seen other services that limit this to only a few networks that they feel are important.
The share widget takes the same form, but is instead encouraging people to share your content.
Promo Widget
This widget allows you to alert your website users to any particular offers that you might be running at that time.
Design and placement is in the same vein as other widgets. The special thing here is that you can add an image to your promo widget in the paid version. For the life of me, I don’t know why they give you that option here but not in the survey widget? Maybe its only me! You can add your own image or choose from an extensive list of ready made ones. These are well designed and professional looking.
The Chat Widget
This is 100% a case of last but not least here. This widget allows you to add a simple chat box option to your site. This is something that I haven’t seen in the other website design services I am currently using and, for me, is the most exciting.
This could be huge for the engagement levels of your audience. I suppose, the only thing is to make sure your visitors don’t expect this to be the same as live chat. For the paid version you can integrate it into a chat program called Slack. This is genius, allowing you to easily chat to website visitors live. If you have enough people in your team to be on there, it could effectively be like the live chat you see for customer support on a lot of big websites.
The free version makes this chat box almost like a smaller version of the contact us widget. The user can send you a message along with their email.
What do I think?
During this GetSiteControl review, we can see they have a really great set of marketing widgets here that work across a wide variety of commonly used website software.
They offer an excellent user experience, that is simple and intuitive to use.
The design aspect will be a matter of personal choice. Some people will like the simple and no nonsense approach these widgets have. Others will want to see the option to customise more.
GetSiteControl have clearly put a lot of work into making their widgets work with a wide variety of third party applications. I am very happy to see this and applaud the effort.
As this website is called SEO Quiz Master, I have to talk about the surveys as an alternative to quizzes. Surveys allow you to ask a lot of the same questions, but don’t give the same level of final feedback. The user will feel more aligned with your business after completing a survey, knowing that you care to get their opinion. This is not quite the same as getting a personal result for them, such as a personality test rating or such like. Of course, I am stating the obvious, as I am mearly pointing out the factual differences between a quiz and a survey. For business’ it will be personal choice as to what they feel they need at that moment in time.
It makes me wonder why GetSiteControl decided to go with a survey app over a quiz one? With the current buzz around quiz conversion rates, it may have been wise for them to include them. As the formats used for surveys and quizzes are similar, I don’t see why they don’t just add both. It wouldn’t take them long and would add to the overall value of their product.
I have talked about personal choice regarding whether people will like the lack of design choices available and the appearance of surveys over quizzes. This is also the case for whether people will feel they need to sign up for the service.
This set of widgets is perfect for someone that is happy with the basic design of their website and just wants to pep it up in the engagement front.
In this highly competitive market, there may be a large number of people in similar situations as me. I have a $19 dollar a month subscription to Thrive Themes. This gives me a full suite of tools for my WordPress site. It also adds on features such as drop and drag page design, which is not present in this GetSiteControl suite of widgets.
In fact, the only things that are available from GetSiteControl over Thrive, are the survey and the chat box widgets. I feel that I could make something almost survey like with Thrive Quiz builder, so I don’t feel I need it. I really like the chat add on feature, but for me it is not worth paying the type of monthly fee that would be required for it. And if I used this on several sites, I need to keep paying multiples to GetSiteControl. My Thrive subscription can be used on up to 15 websites.
So, to sum up. Yes, these are some great widgets and I am sure there is a big market out there for people that would love them and pay for monthly! Just because it is not a good fit for me doesn’t mean it isn’t a good fit for you.
Go sign up for a free account and play around with the widgets. This is the only real way to decide their value to you.
As usual, I would love to hear what you think in the comment section below!
