Last week we reviewed Referrer Detector. This week we review a similar plugin called WP Greet Box.
What is WP Greet Box?
This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL.
For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction.
Screenshot
Features
- Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
- Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts upon activation. There is no need to modify theme files.
- Ability to auto-insert greeting message to the top or bottom of the post.
- Greeting messages can be user closeable or not.
- Ability to detect the visitor’s search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
- Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
- Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
- AJAX greeting message in the frontend makes it compatible with caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) and WPMU.
- AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
- Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
- Ability to set rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages. Regular expressions is also supported (but not required!).
- Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prefix/append HTML around the greeting message box.
- Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!
- blinklist.com
- blogmarks.com
- del.icio.us
- delicious.com
- digg.com
- diigo.com
- facebook.com
- flickr.com
- furl.com
- google.*
- ma.gnolia.com
- mister-wong.com
- myspace.com
- netvibes.com
- newsvine.com
- reddit.com
- search.live.com
- search.msn.com
- search.yahoo.com
- simpy.com
- stumbleupon.com
- technorati.com
- twitter.com
- youtube.com
Our Review
WP Greet Box comes really feature packed as compared to Referrer Detector, possibly because WP Greet Box is more mature plugin as of this date.
Installation of plugin is extremely simple. You can download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory, unzip it to your host and activate the plugin. I chose to use the new Add New Plugin feature in WordPress 2.7 to install it on my blog Techtites from within WP-admin itself.
After activating the plugin, you can add / edit / delete referrers to your blog. The plugin comes inbuilt with several referrers including a default referrer who do not come from the fixed set of sites listed above. There are also a few referrers that are not activated by default, so you choose to activate those. I chose to stick with the default list.
It also has the ability to display related posts, though it displayed no related posts for a query that definitely had related posts.
The plugin has its documentation in place, however, it could do well with more detailed instructions. Also, the documentation is a readme.txt file at the plugin repository, which isn’t the most presentable layout.
I would also like to see Ajaxed tabs as was in the case of Referrer Detector, as it make updating across options extremely quick. The plugin already uses AJAX for editing / updating referrer details.
I believe the author has plans for the plugin, though it is currently kept a secret.
Are you currently using WP Greet Box? Since when have you been using the plugin? Has it helped increase visitor loyalty, number of hits? What additions would you like to see to the plugin features?
Thank you for reviewing WP Greet Box on this amazing blog! I really appreciate the honest opinions and will definitely improve it per your suggestions. My plans are definitely secret, but I assure you that they are awesome :)!
I am also quite interested in how much this has helped people with their reader conversion rate. This post is definitely going to help get that answer.
You’re welcome. Please check back on the post for users’ feedback.
Hi, [sorry for my english 🙂 ]
I’m using this plugin on my personal blog, and I think it’s a great plugin!
For example, i’m using it for people that comes from a membership site that I leaved some month ago, so I can tell them to contact me with a webform!
Bye, Massimo
is this WP-Greet Box compatible with WP 2.7? The WP repository said “compatible up to 2.6.5” so I was just wondering? Also, is the placement of the WP Greet Box code on your blog customizable? I’m just wondering because I have a customized theme that doesn’t follow general standards, only because I can’t find anyone to update it for me, and I’m just wondering if there is a bit of code that you can put in your sites theme as to where u want the greeting to be placed at?
I am running WP Greet Box on my blog running WordPress 2.7
You don’t need to modify your theme. You have the option to choose if you want the message to appear before or after the content.
arrgh! gravatar.com’s still aren’t working for me! arrgh! lol I uploaded an avatar back when gravatar 2.0 came out and its STILL not working! it doesn’t show up right on my blog, or other peoples blogs, yet when I go to gravatar.com, or on my own site using the test thingy, works fine from there *shrugs* whats the deal with gravatar.com anyway?? annoys me!!!
Great plugin! Saw and read your previous review on Referrer Detector and was about to install that but then I saw this and liked it better. Hats off to the Thaya for doing a great job with this plugin. Thanks for sharing!
It’s nice plugin. I think it could be very usefull.
Plugin is totally worth the try! Using it now for a months or so allready and also tried the Ref Detector before. WP GreetBox is much more mature and much mire relieable. Also the developer delivers awesome support if you have issues. Check it out!
Greet Box is miles ahead of Referrer Detector. I’ve been using it on my WP 2.7 blog with great success. The interface is insane well polished with jquery – in fact I think it’s one of the most polished plugins in existence.
Artem
http://beerpla.net
http://twitter.com/ArtemR
Lookin good!! 🙂
I’m using this plugin. Before I was using a somehow similar plugin named “first timer”, but wp-greetbox is a lot better.
I would like to see some stats on ow many visitors subscribe through those greetboxes. It could be done with some javascript and google analytics but but something that just works in wp would be nicer.
That would be pretty brilliant. Indeed, I second this.
1) I love your blog
2) i love this plugin… I found it like 2-3 weeks ago, and it’s fantastic. I have a few blog posts I have planned for how people can implement it in fantastic ways.
I don’t know how much it’s “helped” but I LOVE it…
I installed this plugin earlier and actually love it. Not 100% sure that it is the cause of my traffic influx but all of a sudden I am getting a lot of traffic from facebook. Maybe people have shared my stuff because of this plugin? I usually get some … but this seems to be a bit more. Anyway, I really like the plugin. Good work and thank you to this blog for the heads up.
It’s a nice plugin but… seems to do nearly the same as http://richardkmiller.com/word.....h-godin-do
and is not so good as http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/landing-sites/
The plugin looks good but somehow I’m holding back. I’m holding back on many plugins as I feel I don’t want to swamp people when they arrive on my site.
Just my opinion.
I also have the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin activated, with excerpts. When I tried activating The Greet Box Plugin, all the excerpts were suddenly reading what the Greet Box plugin was supposed to say (“Hi there! .. ).
Might be something to look into.. 🙂
I have used this plugin in the past and it is great. The fact that it works well with caching software puts it ahead of a lot of other plugins out there.
This plugin is awesome! I’m currently using it on some of my sites! 🙂
Impressive! I saw this exact functionality on a site this morning when I visited from Google and wondered how they did it – then I found this 🙂 Looking forward to giving it a go!
Hi,
I installed Greetbox and was delighted to see it work. But what happened in the next few days? It stopped showing up. What could be causing it? Is it because I also use Socibook and Subscribe Remind plug ins? I tried deactivating those two but still no success. Can you resolve it for me?
Hi, I’ve got a similar problem with a friend of mine.. He’s a theme that doesn’t permit to insert the right code in the footer.
So I’ve update it with th right call to the javascript files, and now it’s working!
Hi,
Massimo
Massimo,
Do you have any tips for fixing the javascript? My theme doesn’t seem to allow the code to work properly either. I would really like for this to work, but I just can’t figure it out.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!
Kristin
Nice review.
I am going to install this to see whether my search engine traffic visitors view more pages other than the search engine resultant page.
Nihar, your website is full of bad things. Trojan download forced on users, links to websites deemed dangerous.
Careful folks!
Currently, my WP greet box only appears for individual posts. I was wondering how do I make the greet box appear for my entire single category?
Thanks
Ilove your blog
I love this plugin… I found it like 3 weeks ago, and it’s fantastic. I have several blog posts. Plugin is totally worth the try! Using it now for a few weeks or. WP GreetBox is much more mature and much mire relieable. Also the developer delivers awesome support if you have issues. Check it out!
Sandi
I am a new user of your wonderful plugin. More power to you!
+ I’d like to share some troubleshooting. At first it was working fine, then all of a sudden it stopped working. I tried the troubleshooting method here but none seemed to work. I was about to delete this plugin until I thought of resetting it. When I did, viola! It worked again! I guess I just accidentally did something wrong.
So remember, just reset the settings to default if the greet box doesn’t show up. I did that and it showed up again. Hope that helps someone in the future.
Cheers!