How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/8/14

Indy realizes it takes weeks of planning to get drunk. Early last week, we noticed that over 3,000 people in November were visiting Do317 after searching for what to do in Indy on NYE. Thanks to Do317's strong position on search results pages for queries involving "Indianapolis/Indy" and "New Years Eve," we knew this could potentially be a huge source of great traffic for Do317.

In response, the team in Indy spent some time sprucing up the page, getting good events listed, and generally making it a visually appealing and helpful landing page for users coming in through search.  

The result? On the NYE page alone, bounce rate dropped 40%. This is crucial, since traffic to that page is blowing up. The page is the most popular page on Do317 after the homepage, has received 74% more traffic than last year, and is continuing to grow its pageviews daily.

This NYE content win (in addition to a Lana Del Rey giveaway, a couple successful nightclub RSVPs, and their always popular First Friday list) helped to give Do317 its highest week of traffic and email clicks since we've been doing the Weekly KPI Report.

A couple lessons from this:

1. NYE parties are huge. If you haven't built out a great list for this, you're already behind.
   
2. Even more important than NYE (blasphemy, I know) is monitoring your organic traffic for peaks in people coming to your site. This will let you see what content people are searching for, so that you can make sure you provide them with content that's relevant.
   
   One great way to do this is via the Organic Traffic dashboard (download here) for Google Analytics. Also, if you want, I can enable search query data in your GA account. Just respond to this email, and I'll give you instructions on how to see that data.
   

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 Weekly KPI Report

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