WP Quick Polls Review – How Does It Measure Up?
Monday, August 10, 2009 12:20
I know I blew off WP Quick Polls in my last post, but Joe was nice enough to give out several review copies of WP Quick Polls on the PPC Coach Forums and I was able to get my hands on a copy. I had been sitting on it for a few weeks, but I finally got around to installing it this weekend. I haven’t really seen an in-depth WP Quick Polls review posted online anywhere yet, so below are my thoughts after playing around with the product. I will be comparing it to WP Easy Polls (WPEP) since that is currently my poll creation tool of choice.
For those who aren’t familiar with the product, WP Quick Polls is a WordPress plugin for creating CPA polls. It costs $49.95, which places it between Poll Control and Poll Factory in terms of price. Installation of WP Quick Polls is relatively simple, although it is quite large (10MB) relative to other plugins I have installed. For some reason (slow connection?), it took about 10-15 minutes to upload everything to my server. It is nice to see some documentation and a quick start guide, which I skimmed through, but I am the type of person that likes to figure things out myself.
In a lot of ways, WP Quick Polls and WP Easy Polls offer similar results, using different approaches. WP Quick Polls gives you a lot more power by allowing you to micro-manage every aspect of your polls. Want to change the instruction text size and color? There’s a section for that. Want to customize the number of empty lines before your RSS feed? You can specify this too. You can customize everything including your themes within the WP Quick Polls control panel. However, for those new to polls, I think the amount of options can be overwhelming. Although WP Quick Polls does include a lot of helpful instruction text and inline help, I still found myself constantly confused at what a lot of options did. I can see this being a problem for new users.
WPEP on the other hand is much easier to setup and run out of the box. It only has one single poll creation page and the interface is much easier to get up and running right away. WP Quick Polls does include a Quick Create option which works nicely once you configure it the settings how you like it. However, this just brings it up to speed to WPEP’s default behavior.
One issue I ran into with my WP Quick Polls setup is that I could never get any of my poll images to show up. I ended up having to consult the documentation and it seems like this is a pretty common issue as it has a whole section which addresses this. I currently have WP Quick Polls installed on Hostgator, and othere happens to be an issue with WordPress Fantastico installs. I worked through each of the suggestions like setting the permissions of my cache directory to 755 as well as disabling the cache and resize image options, to no avail. I’m no technical wiz, but I don’t quite understand why displaying an image from a url would require all this messing around. I know Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosts for PPC Coach members so I think this would be an important issue to get resolved.
Poll themes are one of most important aspects of any poll creation tool and WP Quick Polls does include several built-in themes. Based on my experience, it looks like the Plain themes would work the best. They are comparable to the Simple Theme from WPEP which I currently use and get good landing page click through rates with. I have my doubts at how well the other included themes convert as they don’t meet some of the best practices described on the PPC Coach forums. Don’t take my word for it though, as this is something you will want to test yourself. WP Quick Polls does allow you to edit themes from within the control panel. Some may like this, but I find it much easier to edit code in an external text editor.
Feature wise, both tools have the same basic features you want in a poll creation tool, namely offer rotation, and support for both the two popular tracking systems, PPC Coach Tracker and Tracking202. Both also give you the option to use double-metarefresh which is important because it allows you to cloak your referer and hide your poll page. One feature I like, that is unique to WP Quick Polls is the campaign feature, which allows you to group offers together and share them across polls. This might prove to be a nice timesaver. WP Quick Polls also includes several seeminly unnecessary features as well. For example, there are two options in the Settings page, “Show results after vote Javascript” and “Show results on interim page”. Next to each of these options is the text “not recommended” and “even more not recommended”. Why are they in there then? In my opinion, it only serves to clutter up the interface.
Overall, WP Quick Polls does a decent job, but I don’t think I can end up recommending it over WP Easy Polls. I just found the interface too clunky to navigate around and it just feels inundated with various options that I don’t feel I need. WP Quick Polls does have its nice points, but nothing that would warrant shelling out $50 for it when you can get the same functionality for free with WP Easy Polls. If you are a CPA Poll expert and like the ability to modify everything from within the control panel, you may want to give WP Quick Polls a look. However, for everyone else, I think using a free copy of WP Easy Polls is still the way to go.
