Category: General

User Engagement: How To Track With Google Analytics
Recently, one of our clients came to the office for a short meeting. We had built a custom site for his company, but during the course of the meeting, he complained bitterly about the lack of conversion from his website. We decided to get to work, and discovered that his user engagement was virtually zero. We explained to him how to understand the metrics of user engagement with Google Analytics. Now, he’s making enough money from sales and conversions through the knowledge we shared with him.

Do you want to track user engagement on your website? You may be asking yourself what is user engagement? It is a measurement of the value your users find on your website, be it in a product or service. By knowing what your users think of your site, it can help you plan for growth.

This article will help you know the most important Google Analytics metrics and how you can track them.

Why you need to track user engagement

Tracking and optimizing user engagement is very important for your website. This is because it helps you understand what users do when they arrive on your website. Ideal for more conversions and sales, it allows you identify patterns of highly engaged user behavior. Page views and traffic are very important indicators of a website’s performance, but understanding how your audience think will help you get better results.

To track user engagement on WordPress, we advise that you use Google Analytics in combination with a plugin called MonsterInsights. You can download the plugin from the plugin repository of WordPress or by downloading from the Plugin link on the WordPress dashboard. In the last, most people just pasted the Google Analytics script on the website. While this is not bad, there is something better you can do to save time and reduce stress.

MonsterInsights will let you know the outbound links users are clicking, which forms that have the highest conversions, and which online store has the best conversions. You don’t have to deal with the hassle of writing code and configuration when using this plugin. It has automated the process of pasting different codes of analytics in the footer.

Let’s see how we can track different metrics on Google Analytics when it comes to user engagement for your website.
- Time spent on your website
One of the most important things you must find out is to know the time users spend on your website. It is called the session duration and according to HubSpot, 55% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less on your site. If people don’t spend enough time on your website, you won’t be able to convince them up to the point of a Call-To-Action. Analytics can give you information on the session duration.

Simply go to Audience >> Overview. The session duration will show among other stats.

You can also see this important metric by using Behavior >> Site content >> All Pages.

You can fix this by tidying up on your design, improving readability, adding high-quality images and optimizing them, and by using a lot of internal links.
- How users engage with forms
Most contact form plugins don’t give you accurate tracking and conversions data when it comes to collecting user leads and feedback. By using MonsterInsights, you get information on how many times your forms are viewed and submitted. It helps you know which forms on your websites are doing well and vice-versa.

To track your forms, you need to make use of Google Insights. Simply go to Google Insights >> Addons page. You need to install and activate the forms add on.

Do note that you will need a MonsterInisghts Pro plan for this. After doing all this, MonsterInsights will automatically start tracking all forms (website comments, user registration forms).

To track this metric on your Analytics dashboard, go to Behavior >> events >> Overview page.

Under ‘Event Category’, click on ‘form’. Click on the ‘Event Label’ to see stats for different forms on your website. You can then click on any form to see your impressions and conversions.
- Your most popular content
You can plan a content strategy or improve on existing strategy if you know the type and kind of content users like on your site. You need to figure out which blog posts and pages are the most popular among your users. Why is this important? To know the pages and content driving the most traffic on your website and the ones that are not doing so well.

To track this metric, visit Insights >> Reports page in your WordPress admin area. Under the ‘Top Posts and Page’ section, you will see your most popular content.

You can also see the top traffic sources to know where your traffic is coming from.

This understanding will help you channel your marketing and content strategies towards that particular channel.
- Frequency of visits
With this metric, you can see how many sessions were generated from a certain percentage of your audience. It is also defined as the frequency of visits for the average user. In simpler terms, it means the number of times the average user comes back to the website after the first time.

Check this by going to Audience >> Behavior >> Frequency & Recency.
- Bounce Rate
According to Wpbeginner, bounce rate is “the percentage of users who land on your website and decide to leave without going to a second page”. While having bounce rates are normal, a very high bound rates point to a bigger problem. It would seem that your users are not attracted to what your website is all about or the design is off-key. It indicates that you were unable to convince them to check out the other pages of your website after they arrived on the landing page (the page their browser directs them after submitting your URL).

A site with a bounce rate of around 30% and 50% is said to have excellent bounce rate. Any bounce rate between 50% and 70% is seen as an acceptable average while any above 70% is believed to be poor. Do note that since there are different kinds of content on websites, average bounce rate vary from niche to niche.

Login to your Google Analytics dashboard. To check your website’s bounce rate, Go to Audience >> Overview page.

To check for the bounce rate of an individual page, click on Behavior >> Site content >> All pages to see the bounce rate for each page.
- Page views per visit
Another important metric for user engagement with Google Analytics is page views. It tells you how many times a page is viewed for a given period. The more the page views per session, the more time users spend on your website which invariably means fewer bounce rates.

You can track page views per visit by going to Audience >> Overview. You can also get more information on the traffic channels that are converting the best for your site.

Click on Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels page.
- Average pages per visit
This metric is important for media websites as the more pages people visit on your site, the more ad impressions are generated, which in turn leads to higher revenue. It works on the premise that when people browse more pages on your site, they are more likely to see the ads placed on your website. It is also an important metric for ad or service-based websites like SaaS (software as a service) and e-commerce sites.

You can track this metric by going to Audience >> Overview. On the dashboard, you will see Pages/Session.

You can also take a look at the pages per session for each channel to understand this user engagement metric as well. You can do that by going to Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels.
- Percentage of returning visitors
This is one metric that is as important as any other. It is the understanding that these users are engaged with your brand; they have visited the site once, liked what they saw and have come back for more of the same or something better. This metric also shows the disparity between new and returning users/visitors. By understanding this percentage, it helps you to unearth more techniques on keeping them on your platform.

You can track this metric by going to Audience >> Overview. On the dashboard, you will see the percentage of returning visitors.
- Days since last session
Google Analytics helps you understand how often people visit your website and knowing the last time they came. When the difference is big, it might mean you are not being consistent with internal links from social media or you are not posting regular content.

Go to Audience >> Behavior >> Frequency & Recency and click on ‘Days since last session’
- Affiliate links
An affiliate link is a specific URL that contains an affiliate’s ID or username. An affiliate is someone or a website that pays you a commission when people buy their products on your website. To make affiliate links look more user-friendly, most affiliate marketers use plugins to manage these links. MonsterInsights helps you gather more information or track the links that are doing well, which posts are generating more affiliates and more.

To get started with affiliate link tracking with Google Analytics, you need to visit Insights >> Settings page. On this page, click on ‘Affiliate links’ after switching to the tracking tab.
1. The first thing you need to do is enter the slug you use for your affiliate links. After doing this, you need to provide a label you would like to use for these links on your Analytics reports.
2. Click on ‘Save Changes’
Your affiliate links CA now n be tracked by Monster Insights. To view this metric, go to Behavior >> Events >> Overview Page.

The links you chose earlier will be available alongside their affiliate link clicks.
- AdSense clicks and impressions
Google AdSense is a reliable way of making money online while creating useful content. By using Google Analytics, you can see how users interact with ads on your site. You will be able to identify the most effective ad placements, track how many clicks each ad is receiving and know which ads your audience is ignoring.

The first thing you need to do is visit Insights >> Addons page on your WordPress site. Install and activate the ‘Ads Tracking’ addon. For you to be able to get this information, you need to integrate Google Analytics with your AdSense account. To do this, head over to your Google Analytics dashboard. On the bottom left corner of the screen, click on the ‘Admin’ button.

Now that you are in the admin section, click on ‘AdSense Linking’ under the property column. Next, click the +New AdSense link button and then select AdSense property that you want to link with your Analytics property. Click on continue to go ahead. Select the Analytics view in which you want your AdSense data to be available. Once you select that, click Enable Link and then click done.

You are not done yet. After everything is configured on Google Analytics, you need to head over to the WordPress dashboard. Go to Insights >> Settings page. Click on the Ads section after switching to the ‘Tracking tab’.

NB: Google AdSense tracking checkbox must be clicked.

To view your key AdSense metrics in Analytics, go to Behavior >> Publisher page.
- Audience Engagement Rate
This metric is quite similar to the average time spent on your audience. However, there is more information here. You can see the specific time duration a certain percentage of your audience stayed on your site (from 0-20 seconds up to 1800 seconds)

To do this, go to Audience >> Behavior >> Engagement

Final Thoughts

With all these user engagement metrics, you will understand your audience better. You will learn how people interact with your website, and identify problems. With this in mind, you can learn what you need to improve to engage your audience further and better Google Analytics is absolutely free and offers you the best data when it comes to user engagement. We hope this article helped you understand the metrics you can get information on with Google Analytics.

Do you track the following metrics for your site using Google Analytics? Let us know in the comments below. You can also add others that you have tracked before.

Get in touch with us and find us across social media platforms @MactavisDigital. We have built expertise in web design and development, mobile app development, content production and copywriting, SEO and other digital services. We would love you to do business with you.
September 25, 2018
How To Make Your Website GDPR Compliant
The European Union (EU) on May 25, 2018, enacted a new regulation (GDPR) whose aim is to protect the data and information of different website users. The European continent had been looking for the solution to threats on cybersecurity and felt that a radical approach as to how information is managed is the panacea for the increasing wave of such threats.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation that allows users to have complete control over their data. WordPress is taking a whole new dimension in 2018, and as a site administrator, you have to make sure that your site doesn’t flout these rules.

This article highlights the changes you can effect on your site to make it GDPR compliant. Let’s go.

What is GDPR?

As a site administrator, you have to tell users why you need their information. The GDPR is designed to provide better protection of personal data – or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – to people living in the European Union. The GDPR imposes specific obligations on “controllers” or “processors” of personal data. Failure to meet these obligations can lead to major fines of up to €20m.

The European Union passed this regulation to affect everyone on the continent. However, this regulation has ripple effects on the rest of the world. Regardless of your location, as long as you collect information from someone in the borders of the EU, you are subject to this law. This is because you have information owned by the EU resident.

Here’s what you’ll be responsible for to ensure you are GDPR compliant:
- Tell the user: who you are, why you need their data, how long you are keeping the data and who has access to it.
- Get clear consent, before collecting the data.
- You must give users the ability to see their own data, download and delete permanently from your archives.
- In the event of a security breach, you let your users know about it.
GDPR and the WordPress Community

As plugin developers and site administrators, we are responsible for managing our sites well so users can manage their data. 30% of the internet runs on WordPress, therefore we need to do a lot. WordPress is a Content Management System that enables a massive flow of information between our sites and users. For WordPress admins, there is a website called GDPRWP that has been set up to provide plugin developers with a simple solution to ‘GDPR-validate’ their plugins.

For administrators, they also provide tools and overview to handle administrative duties as regards GDPR. You also get the chance to get into a Slack community that provides help and support to plugin developers and website administrators. Check out their website here.

What You Need To Do

Contact forms must explain a lot

Almost all websites have contact forms. This is the simplest way for visitors to contact you directly. For your forms to be GDPR compliant, you must state why you are asking for any information. Let’s say for example when the user is adding an email address or phone number, a pop-up that says, “This is how you will be contacted.” should come up. It helps to clarify your use of their information.

Another thing you need to add to your form is having a checkbox for users to confirm that they accept the terms of service for using your website and how they agree to be contacted. This is called UNBUNDLED OPT-IN. If you wish to send further marketing communications to the customer you must have different checkbox options for each type of marketing, whether it be by email, text or post.

This boxes must be UNTICKED by default, so they have the option of choosing what they want. This is what is called a Granular Opt-In and is a key requirement of being GDPR compliant. For excellent user experience, the user of a website must know that they have the right to withdraw their consent as easily as they give it.

Ask for the bare minimum of information

A good rule of thumb is to ask for as little information as possible from your users. A lot of websites, forms, and plugins ask for a lot of information that is not really needed. Ask for the basics as GDPR states that you must be able to explain why you need a particular piece of information. If you are asking for their full names, tell them why.

GDPR has made asking information for “future use” or “just in case” not advisable, therefore the information you ask must be as explicit as possible.

Email marketing should be monitored

One of the major aims of GDPR is to ensure users or customers do not receive unsolicited emails, whether from companies they know or do not know. If customers decide to ignore these emails, they will be automatically unsubscribed. This has been welcomed by many who receive unsolicited emails from websites and their partners.

The regulation also ensures that website owners must only send out marketing material and information to users that have officially opted-in and make it easy to unsubscribe.

Be careful of the information you store on your website

For e-commerce websites that use payment gateways for financial transactions, being GDPR compliant is a must. This is because you may be collecting personal data before passing the details to the payment gateway. You need to modify your web processes to remove any personal information after a reasonable number of days, say 60 or 90 days. This is to ensure you can defend the storage of users’ PII if you are found culpable of violating GDPR regulations.

Conclusion

The WordPress community is hard at work helping website owners with GDPR opt-in and compliance. While the regulation is still relatively novel and still laced with some uncertainties, be rest assured that in the coming months, there will be many more options in your favourite plugins or extensions made by third parties.

To make your site compliant with GDPR regulations, make sure you’re transparent with people and follow the aforementioned guides.

Follow @MactavisDigital on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with us. We are experts at Web Design and Development, Search Engine Optimization, Mobile App development, and other digital services. Contact us for your inquiries and check out our portfolio to see samples of our previous projects.
July 19, 2018
How To Start A Money-Making Fashion Blog
Do you own a fashion blog or website? Or you want to create one and don’t know where and how to begin. While it is easy to create a blog, making money from it can be the more difficult task. If fashion is something you can write, talk or generally passionate about, then getting paid for what you love doing is an added incentive to getting it done.

The best time to have created a fashion blog was like two years ago but the next best time is now. You don’t need to be a stylist, designer or tailor to get started. You might just love outfits, and voila!, you start earning a lot of money. To be a fashion blogger, you must have a unique perspective on fashion.

This article highlights how you can get into the fashion blogging industry. Let’s get started.

What Should Be On A Fashion Blog

A fashion blog should be a reflection of who you are. To be an authority on the online fashion space, there are some things you should have on your blog. The best fashion blogs in Nigeria such as Bella Naija and Madivas keep attracting a lot of readers due to the amount of information they churn out.

We have highlighted some of the best sections a fashion blog should have:

Weddings: Having a Wedding Section is surely advised. People keep looking out for new trends, new fashion tips and the best accessories combination for that special day. Partner with top brands and even budding entrepreneurs to promote their wedding gowns, shoes, and accessories. Also, write on wedding colour themes and event decoration.

You can give tips on how to accommodate different cultures on the wedding day. You can also decide to sell wedding apparel yourself by integrating payment gateways and e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce.

Fashion News and Opinion: This section should be what readers and users see first when they access your blog. Push the latest news in the fashion space, what a celebrity is wearing, the best and worst dressed celebrities at shows.

You can also write opinion articles. For instance, during the rainy section, you can create a post titled, “How To Ensure Your Fashion Game Is Still Tight During The Rainy Season “. For so many people, this is a challenge. By writing a post that talks about a common and recurring problem, you become an authority.

Trends: You must be in tune with the latest trends in the fashion world. What are the new colour combinations people are trying? Which accessories are trending? These trends must be featured on your blog. Research a lot and also go for a lot of fashion events and meetups to be abreast of the latest designs and happenings in the industry.

Beauty and Lifestyle: On a fashion blog, you can never go wrong with having a Beauty and Lifestyle section. Write blog posts on topics such as Skincare, makeup, hair care, manicure and pedicure, and anything that relates to beauty. Feature products that focus on different skin types to attract a wide range of visitors. You can also talk about lifestyle with topics such as Relationship Talks, Healthy Living, and even Nutrition. They help drive traffic as well.

What You Need To Start

The first thing you should do is choose the platform on which you want to build your blog. There are a lot of Content Management Systems that you can use, but WordPress is highly recommended. It’s support system and ease of use are excellent It is very user-friendly, meaning you don’t need to be a techie to get the hang of it. To get started with WordPress, there are a few things you need:
- Domain Name: When using wordpress.com, you can get a free domain name that is a subdomain of wordpress.com (e.g. myfashionblog.wordpress.com). If you would prefer your own domain name (e.g. myfashionblog.com), you can purchase a domain name from whogohost.com by clicking this link.
- Web Hosting – This is where all your website files will be stored. When using wordpress.com, you don’t have to bother about this, hosting is taken care of.
- Theme: A WordPress theme provides the frontend of your blog. You can search the WordPress Theme Repository for a theme that suits your taste. There are free themes and premium themes which cost about ($45 – $60). You can also get a custom theme built to fit your brand or your specific design preferences. You can get in touch with us for that.
Choosing a Design

Being a fashionista, your blog shouldn’t be drab. It doesn’t matter if you only do product reviews, or a designer showcasing your products or a blogger that shares fashion news. Your blog should look appealing and needs a design that appeals to the reader. It must also represent your unique sense of style and creativity.

There are thousands of WordPress theme for fashion blogs that you can choose from. A lot of themes have creative designs which are flexible and easily editable. You can add your logo, choose colors and change basic settings. The most important feature of a theme is responsiveness.

A responsive site is a website that looks just as good on mobile devices as it looks on a computer. It’s easy to read on any screen size without the need to zoom, resize, or scroll horizontally.

Content Quality

While a pleasing design will attract people to your website, having good and useful content is what will keep them coming back. Pages such as About Us and Contact Us help make you look professional. Once you have set up those pages, you can start adding posts, images, and pictures.

Research for fashion topics that people search for, and write content around it. Your blog posts should be entertaining, informative, and helpful. Keep up to date with fashion trends and update your blog with new trends and news. You also need to be consistent, as regular updates mean that more people will get to read what you are writing.

Visit popular blogs in the fashion industry to find trending topics you can blog about.

While doing this, you can’t copy and paste content from other sites. This is plagiarism, and is illegal, especially if the source has a copyright on the article. Your site would also get penalized by search engines like Google if your blog contains plagiarized content.

Social Media

Leveraging social media is important to build your audience and the reputation of your blog. A lot of your intended audience is already on different social media platforms, especially Instagram. You can get access to that vast audience by following trends and making sure you are in the conversation. You should also direct your social media followers to your website by sharing links to your articles.

Page Optimization

Getting users to find your website out of the millions of websites out there is a skill that will set you apart from the rest. Here are ways you can improve your website visibility.
- S.E.O: Search Engine Optimization is a long-term and continuous effort that pays large returns. Ensure that your blog posts contain keywords that your intended audience search for. This would make your website rank higher in Google search results.
- Improve your site speed: Page speed is very important for user experience. You wouldn’t want a situation where people have to spend a lot of time before your website pages load. While network and signal strength affect page speed, there are steps you can take to make your website faster. Test the speed of your website or theme that you intend to use for your website here. Also, try to avoid uploading large images on your website cos they reduce your page speed, you can compress your images here.
- User Engagement: Put yourself in the place of the user. What would you do when you first arrive on a website? You must be able to track what your audience is doing, this helps you know what you need to improve on as you will see the pages with the most and least visits and other useful information. You can use Google Analytics for this.
Let’s Make Some Money

Once your fashion blog is established and has a sizable audience, brands may pay you to promote their brands. That should be your goal, as it offers you the opportunity to earn while doing what you love. A lot of successful bloggers their income from paid and sponsored content.

Here are some other ways to monetize your fashion blog.
- Google AdSense: AdSense is an advertising program by Google that lets you display ads on your website and make money. You get paid based on the number of views and clicks that the ads on your site get. In a future post, we would explain more about Google AdSense, but you can find out more by doing research online.
- Become an affiliate marketer: How cool is it to get paid for referring people to buy a particular product? That is how affiliate marketing works. You get paid a commission when you recommend a product. You can be an affiliate marketer for fashion brands and online fashion stores. Once people buy these products via your site, you get paid a commission.
- Sponsored Posts: A sponsored post is a post written on behalf of a brand or company to promote their products or brand. You can write sponsored posts for brands and charge for it. Another form of sponsored posts is featured posts. For a featured post, a brand provides the content but post it on your blog in order to get access to your audience.
Setting up a money-making fashion blog requires a lot of patience and consistency. You might struggle to earn at the initial stage, but doing the aforementioned puts you in the right direction, though you must also research and keep up with emerging trends in the fashion space.

If you liked this article, connect with us across all social media platforms @MactavisDigital, and do check out our portfolio to see examples of the projects we have done in the past.
June 26, 2018
6 Tips For Choosing The Best Domain Name for Your Website

The first thing most people try to figure out when they want a website is what domain name to use. A domain name is basically the address and name of your website (e.g. mactavis.com). It’s what people type into their web browsers to get to your site. Most people try to have a domain name that’s the same as their brand name. That’s good but there are chances that it is in use by someone else. Don’t be too dispirited about it, you are not alone.

It is good practice to decide and check the availability of a domain name first before settling on a brand name. This is important because you might register your business name (with the Corporate Affairs Commission if you are in Nigeria) and by the time you want to have a website or presence on social media, you discover that the name is already in use. This article highlights important things you should consider to get the best domain name for your website.

It can be argued that the success of a website is closely tied to its name. If you make the mistake of choosing wrongly, it can be difficult to switch names without hurting your brand and affecting your search rankings.

Brand first, keywords second

When choosing a domain name, it is important that you use a name that is unique. For SEO purposes, it is beneficial to have keywords in your domain. By doing this, you tell search engines what your website is about. This will help you rank higher in search engines such as Google, though having quality content and good user experience is equally as important in ranking on Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Finding a domain name with target keywords that are not taken already is like finding a needle in a haystack, but you can be creative and combine your keywords to ensure your domain name stands out. You can check for the availability of a domain name by using this site.

Use .com if you can

We’d personally recommend a .com domain name extension and here’s why. Dot com domains are the most common and most likely to be typed in browsers. Many users, especially those that are not too techy automatically type .com at the end of every domain without thinking twice.

There are a lot of top-level domain extensions available at the moment such as .net, .org and even niche extensions such as .pizza, .blog and even .photography. That said though, .com is still the most widely used domain extension that most users are familiar with.

Make it brand-oriented

To make your domain name stand out in your reader’s mind, it should express your brand name which should be unique. For example, Mactavis sounds good and is unique.

Your domain names should be unique, catchy and memorable as well. Truth is, this is not easy, but not impossible. Only takes time and a lot of creativity.

Keep your domain name short, spell-able and easily pronounceable

Most brands make the mistake of using homophones when selecting a domain name. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently. Examples are air and heir, stair and stare, and shore and sure. Words with suffixes such as psy-, ph- should generally be avoided, as their complete word pronunciations don’t always have the same spellings.

You should be able to easily share your domain when speaking as well as writing. It should spell as it sounds.

Domain names with long character length may result in typos when users try to look up the website, and that may mean you lose traffic to other websites. It is recommended that you keep your domain name under 15 characters as longer domain names are more difficult to remember. Also try keep the number of syllables under 3 or 4. Domains with 1 or 2 syllables are the easiest to remember.

Avoid double letters and hyphens

Try to avoid hyphens when choosing a domain. Remember our rule:

A good domain should spell as it sounds.

Hyphens are generally not easy to remember. They are also a common feature in domains used by phishing sites used for fraud as the fraudsters try to mask legitimate domains by adding hyphens.

Users may also end up at your competitor’s site if they forget the hyphens in yours, and that’s a great risk.

Also, try to avoid the use of double letters, because they increase the chance of typos, which ultimately lead to a loss of traffic. Imagine a website with the name, “happinesssecrets.com”, there is a big chance that one of the “s” may be skipped which leads the user to an entirely different website.

We hope the article helped inform you on the necessary tips to consider on choosing the best domain name for your website.

Connect with us across all social media platforms @MactavisDigital for your website and mobile application design and development, training, Search Engine Optimization, and other digital services.

June 21, 2018
4 Best Nigerian Payment Gateways

Payment gateways have simplified the payments in Nigeria. Back in the day before the advent of e-commerce platforms, paying for goods and services involved going through many processes that wasted time and resources. Let me tell you a story. Mr. Lukman is the owner of a printing firm at Somolu, which is the hub of printers in Lagos, Nigeria. He often struggled with customers paying for his services, as time and time again, he delivered his orders without being paid in full.

When a web developer spoke to him about getting a website and integrating a payment gateway, he realized that he didn’t have to go through any stress to get paid for his services. All his customers had to do was input their card details on a platform and voila, he got credited. A payment gateway had done all the heavy lifting for him.

Most payment gateways have plugins that you can seamlessly install if you have a WordPress site, they also have plugins for other platforms such as Opencart, Magento, Drupal etc.

Here are 4 payment gateway platforms you can use for your website.

Paystack

If you are looking for value and quality at the same time, Paystack is a good bet. They are a fast growing payment gateway in Africa and have worked with a number of popular brands. You don’t need to write any code. They also offer subscriptions which is useful if you offer a service and need to bill your customers at certain intervals. Paystack also has zero integrations fees unlike some other payment gateways, which is a major advantage and point of consideration.

Most web developers opt for paystack because of their seamless integration, extensive documentation, and wonderful User Interface. It is also quite easy to ‘Go Live’ with Paystack.

*Go Live refers to moving your account from a test account to a Live Account, this is a daunting process with Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay, Webpay etc.

Note that for business accounts, you need to upload business information such as CAC Documents, ID of business owners and some other information to go live.

You can see how it works in this demo.

Rates: You pay 1.5% + ₦100 for local transactions and the ₦100 fee is waived for transactions below ₦2,500. For international cards, you get charged 3.5% + ₦100 and you get paid in 24 hours. Transaction charges are capped at ₦2,000. Find out more at paystack.com

Rave by Flutterwave

Rave is a payment gateway that allows multi-currency transactions. You can get payments from cards, mobile money wallets, and bank accounts. Implementing Rave is easy, and you don’t have to be a developer to use it. For your checkout page, all you need is to add the code snippet for the page and API keys, and you can use their plugins for easy integration to your website. Like Paystack, Rave doesn’t charge for integration. Go Live is also a breeze with Flutterwave.

Rave is PCIDSS level 1 compliant. Some advantages Rave currently has over Paystack are lower transaction fees and dollar currency support. With Rave, you can list amounts in dollars, a feature Paystack currently doesn’t support. Find out more at ravepay.co

Interswitch Webpay

Interswitch is one of the most trusted payment gateways and is one of the first payment gateway providers in Nigeria. It is used by major brands in Nigerias. They are a secure, reliable and scalable platform for electronic transactions processing.

There is a one-time integration fee of ₦150,000 and for every successful transaction, there’s a transaction fee of 1.5% of the value of the transaction which is capped at ₦2,000.

The major issue with Interswitch is their Go Live process, it is long and complicated. It involves scanning and printing of forms, sending several mails, and filling of several forms again. Note that, it is not for the faint-hearted and can be annoying. Interswitch is a wonderful payment gateway, but they are badly in need of a modern on-boarding process. Another major problem is integration, Webpay and other Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay are not all that easy to integrate and don’t have very good documentation as you would get with Paystack and Rave.

Webpay also doesn’t provide a dashboard for users to view their transactions which is a major turn-off for most businesses.

GTBank GTPay

Guaranty Trust Bank is one of the leading financial institutions in Nigeria, and their payment gateway, GTPay is a secure web payment solution that enables merchants to receive payments from both local and international payment cards.

GTPay is based on Interswitch’s Webpay, so the integration and on-boarding process is similar. It is plagued by most of the issues WebPay has.

Before using GTPay, you should know that they currently charge a one-time integration fee of ₦75,000.

An important advantage of GTPay and WebPay based payment gateways is better security. The lack of a user-dashboard and a seamless onboarding process can be considered a feature and not a bug, cos it makes fraud by much more difficult. A User dashboard can be an avenue to siphon money and defraud a business if it can be accessed by fraudulent people or even the web developer of the business owner.

There are a number of other payment gateway platforms that you can use, but these four are some of the best out there.

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June 14, 2018