In a lot of ways, I’m a little old school for a millennial about to turn thirty. I still listen to music on my iPod, I rarely store files in the cloud and I try to experience most of the world through my eyes, as opposed to a four-inch screen.
As for my shopping habits, I’m also somewhat reluctant to change in that I don’t buy much online. Call me old fashioned but I like to be in a store where I can see and feel something before making a decision. Of course, with some purchases you have to go the online route, like website plugins, obviously.
It’s fair to say I was a bit nervous buying WP Viral Quiz.
For me, the anxiety of potential buyer’s remorse is almost as bad as the remorse itself, especially when I’m feeling rushed (more on that in a minute). Luckily for me, however, anxiety of the unknown was all I experienced. Why? Because this plugin rocks.
I’m going to walk you through exactly what I mean by this as I outline the buying process, setting it up, the customer service and finally the results.
Why I Wanted a Quiz
Let me start by saying I don’t believe every website should have a quiz. In fact, I think there are very few hard-and-fast rules that you can make for all websites. With that, it’s important to know you actually need a quiz before jumping into choosing the right one. So here’s my story…
Some coworkers and I decided to enter an SEO (search engine optimization) contest. The purpose of the contest is to outrank all other contestants for a Google search of “SEO Hero” by mid-March. I won’t belabor you with the rest of the details, but you can read more about it here
So I had one goal – to rank as I high as I could in Google for “SEO Hero”. Being an SEO professional who knew he’d be going up against other pros, it was important to recognize my strengths and weaknesses.
- Technical SEO – I knew there would be plenty of contestants more skilled in this area.
- Keyword research – I pride myself in this category, but I’d be a fool to think I was the best in the competition.
- Off-page optimization – Same with keyword research – good, not great.
So I was left with creating awesome content.
If you know much about how SEO has evolved over the years, you’ve heard it’s become less about the tricks and more about the substance. I knew I had to create something excellent. As a result, I chose a quiz to be the backbone.
It’s no secret many have speculated that Google loves sticky content, the type that keeps users on the page longer. What better way to do that than a site with interactive elements, like a quiz? Plus, quizzes are incredibly shareable, something Google also values.
I also thought it would be fun. Have you ever taken a BuzzFeed-style quiz and wondered how it was put together? From the research to the question development to scoring the answers, it was something I was excited to try one day. I had actually thought of something similar to my SEO Hero personality quiz a while back, minus the ‘hero’ part, and this was my chance.
How I chose WP Viral Quiz
My first forty days with Viral Quiz started on December 9th, 2016. This was a few weeks before launching my site and a day before purchasing the quiz plugin. I began with some research on these types of plugins and then brainstormed a list of criteria I would consider:
- Cost – This was a winner-take-all contest, so I didn’t want to invest too much.
- Ability to customize – Rarely anything is perfect for your site right out of the box, so I wanted to easily be able to customize as needed. I say “easily” because I am a novice when it comes to web development.
- Ease of setting up – With needing to rank for “SEO Hero” by mid-March, I was in a sprint to get this site live. The fewer the roadblocks I encountered, the better.
- Analytics – I wasn’t sure exactly how at the time, but I knew I wanted to use the answer data to produce more content, giving people a reason to come back to the site
There were obviously other factors I considered (aesthetics, page load time, etc.), but these were the ones to which I paid most attention. Based on my criteria and user reviews, I narrowed it down to five options: Quiz Cat, WP Quiz, Wp-Pro-Quiz, WordPress Quiz, and finally this one, Viral Quiz. Here’s a look at how they stacked up to my criteria.
Cost
Wp-Pro-Quiz was the only truly free one of the bunch. WP Quiz had a free version, but it didn’t include any analytics, so I only considered the paid version. Similarly with Quiz Cat, their $29 version did not include analytics so I only considered the $59 version.
| Theme | Price | My Reaction |
| WP Viral Quiz | $25 | 🙄 |
| Quiz Cat | $59 | 🙁 |
| WP Quiz | $27 | 🙄 |
| Wp-Pro-Quiz | $0 | 🙂 |
| WordPress Quiz | $19 | 🙄 |
Ability to customize
This one is a bit tougher to gauge, because you don’t really know until you try it. Although, with Viral Quiz it was enormously easier because they have a demo for you try it out yourself before making a decision!
| Theme | Customizability | My Reaction |
| WP Viral Quiz | Easy CSS customization. Can add pictures or GIFs to questions and answers. No limits on questions or scores. Restart quiz feature. Ability to randomize answers. CRM integration. Single or multi-page options. Limited choices of social sharing platforms. |
😀 |
| Quiz Cat | Many of the same features as Viral Quiz, but all quizzes required a “Start Quiz” button. For my site, this was a negative since my hero-image CTA already took people to the quiz and I didn’t want to require two clicks. |
🙄 |
| WP Quiz | Many of the features above. Ability to add animation. Image credit functionality. Answers were limited between 0 and 2 points. My quiz had 11 possible results so I needed more flexibility with the points. |
🙄 |
| Wp-Pro-Quiz | Some of the features above. Question randomization functionality. No auto-scroll to next question. Limited visual customization. |
🙁 |
| WordPress Quiz | According to some of the quiz comments, it looked like a personality quiz was not possible with this plugin. It also appeared to have limited visual customization. |
🙁 |
Ease of setting up
Because of the backend demo, this was another area where I felt very confident choosing Viral Quiz. With the others, I had to rely on screenshots, videos, marketing language and user reviews (none of which are full-proof).
| Theme | Ease of setting up | My Reaction |
| WP Viral Quiz | I built a quiz before paid a dime. I also was able to customize quizzes others had built on the demo site. It was very intuitive. |
😀 |
| Quiz Cat | It appeared like it would be easy to setup, but without a demo, there was no way to know for sure. |
🙄 |
| WP Quiz | There’s a 25-minute video on the plugin page to walk users how to set up the quiz. It seemed fairly easy. |
🙂 |
| Wp-Pro-Quiz | There was a disorganized forum-based section to read through. It wasn’t easy to tell. |
🙁 |
| WordPress Quiz | Other than a few screenshots, it was difficult to know. | 🙁 |
Analytics
I wanted to be able to track every answer and quiz result to repurpose into more engaging content. This was critical to my decision. It’s important to note the Viral Quiz demo did not have the add-on installed in order to track all answers, but this is definitely an available feature to purchasers.
| Theme | Ability to track all answers and results | My Reaction |
| WP Viral Quiz | Yes | 😀 |
| Quiz Cat | Yes | 🙂 |
| WP Quiz | No | 🙁 |
| Wp-Pro-Quiz | Yes | 🙂 |
| WordPress Quiz | Yes | 🙂 |
Setting the quiz up
Even with the awesome “try before you buy” demo feature, I was still a little anxious about any issues I’d encounter and how quickly I could get them resolved. After all, I was racing to get this site set up and indexed in Google, so every day mattered.
I’ll keep this section short because I’ve touched on a lot of it already.
Installing the quiz and setting it up was as easy as advertised. I literally had no issues.
I got hung up at one point trying to customize the CSS so I sent in a support ticket. The Viral Quiz promises a response within five days. Much to my delight, the answer came in just three days (and just as important, the answer worked like a charm).
Another feature I appreciated was the support documentation on the site, which featured a robust FAQ section and even a smart chat bot to answer some of the more common questions.
Results of the quiz
Now to the fun part. This is what it’s all about anyway, right? Before diving in, please consider two things which I believe are essential for context.
- To date, I have not spent a dime on advertising. While that may change, understand that none of these numbers are monetarily influenced.
- My domain is completely brand new. Launching a new piece of content on an established domain with built-up momentum and a loyal audience certainly gives you an advantage. However, the contest rules state everyone must start with a fresh site. If you’ve ever launched a site from scratch, you’ll know it can take several months before you start generating any volume worth noting.
This data is accurate as of 1/20/17.
Quiz usage
The site currently boasts a quiz completion rate of 46%.
That. Number. Is. INSANE.
The quiz is 16 questions long, so even if it takes someone 5 seconds per question, almost half of my visitors are committing over a minute of their day filling out this quiz.
Social shares
I’ll let you be the judge. Here are the latest shares on Twitter.
On-site engagement
My site currently averages a 38.5% bounce rate and a 3:33 time on site. The time on site is especially impressive given the website only has three pages.
Visibility
To date, we’ve generated nearly 700 visits and we haven’t even been live a full month. Equally impressive, those 700 visits are across 41 different countries, over half of which have sent at least two visits.
Conclusion
If you’re reading this article, chances are you could be in the market for a WordPress quiz plugin. I can’t say I’m an expert in this area, but I have hands-on experience, and for me that experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I hope this answered a few of your questions and gave some other factors to consider when making your decision.
