How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 2/2/15

Do502's Forecastle Foreplay. You all should be pretty familiar with how giveaways traditionally work on our site: 1) you set up a giveaway 2) there's some amount of promotion on socials/email/etc. 3) a bunch of people go to the event page and enter 4) you select some winners and make a few users' day 5) rinse. repeat.

However, with the run up to Forecastle in Louisville, Do502 altered the process a little to provide some more robust pre-Forecasetle content. They built this lineup and ticket giveaway combo page to provide a single page that they could push traffic towards for users to:

1. Easily enter the ticket giveaway (most important outcome)
2. Clearly see the fest lineup image on the page
3. Read some brief copy about the fest
4. Purchase tickets to the fest
5. Directly subscribe to the newsletter

The potential downfall here would be people not actually clicking through to enter the giveaway, but looking at the stats, bounce rate for this page was a paltry 6%. And while the 123 unique pageviews on the subscription page since it went live isn't anything astronomical, there's still a good chance they were able to get some emails from this that they might not have gotten purely through the giveaway. Plus, they got one centralized hub that could receive all of the traffic from the lineup announcement.

No surprises on the traffic hard numbers: 4K more site visits than any previous week and 54% more newsletter clicks than any previous week.

Of course, for this to be successful you need a few things:

• Obvious call to action at the very beginning of the page so that you don't lose people that would've otherwise entered
• Teaser and subscription pages with super solid design
• A HUGE giveaway that makes it worthwhile putting in the time to build a piece of editorial that acts as a landing page and hub you can drive traffic towards. 99% of your giveaways won't be worth this level of effort, but something to consider for the really big giveaways.