Tuesday, August 25, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + New App Winner - 8/25/15

No comments:

Winner of the Week:
Do317 & Do210!

Indy Races To The Front  + Do210 Whacks the Traffic Pinata
It's late in the evening, but it's never too late to check out the newly updated App User Leaderboard. While Do512 still has the most downloads, Do317 edged by Do502 in % of audience on the app.

For everyone else - keep up the great work surfing the app request/feedback flood. Last week, we added nearly 15,000 new unique users on the app alone! Remember that down the stretch, it's going to be the app partnerships that make all the difference, so let us know in the tracking spreadsheet if you've got anything cooking.

Back in the familiar world of web Winners of the Week, Do210 quietly posted their highest week of traffic of all time. The event to thank? This Do210 theater takeover event featuring Pinata Protest.

Pretty simple why this was so successful, but some stats to put it in context:
  • The event page itself received a whopping 4,965 pageviews and 1.4K RSVPs since going live. Last week alone, the page accounted for 18% amount of Do210's total traffic. 
  • As is often the case with successful RSVPs, no one channel drove the majority of traffic. Instead, this event was a hit across Do210's audience, getting hundreds of pageviews across social, email, organic search, and especially from referral and direct channels.
  • More importantly, this event shows the power of using your connections and attaching yourself to a local band that has a serious draw in the community. Need more proof? Check out this last Pinata Protest-featured winner of the week for Do210. Of course, the free beer and snacks don't hurt either. 
All told, it was a packed house with people having a great time, and a week later, Do210's stats reflect just that. See how your KPIs fared in the updated report below:
Read More

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/17/15

No comments:

Winner of the Week:
Do317, DoLA, & Do502!

New App Partnerships + Louisville Makes Good on ABT (Always Be Testin')
As is customary now that we're in the dawn of the DoStuff App, here's our newly overhauled App User Leaderboard (it's the same one you should've received earlier today). And while Do512 still has the most downloads and Do502 has the highest % of normalized audience, we thought we'd share a few wins from markets that have locked down some impressive partnerships:
  • Do317: Partnering with The Vogue to promote the app via their exclusive "12 Months of Shows" giveaway.
  • DoLA: Offering drink tickets to people who have the app on site at Echo Park Rising. This is part of their long term plan to offer app-exclusive rewards to early adopters of the app. Check out the nitty gritty.
Have a creative app partnership you want shared? Let us know by putting it in the partnership spreadsheet!

Outside of App Land, Do502 takes home the Winner of the Week this time thanks to capitalizing on some new Mailchimp testing functionality.

The long and short of it:
  • Thanks to Mailchimp overhauling their testing platform, you can now do things like testing 3 variations at once and easily A/B test entire blocks of your content without digging into the HTML
  • Do502 decided to use this to test their weekly newsletter with From fields of "Do502," "Amelia," and "Jeffrey." But can something as small as a From field make all that big of difference?
  • According to the data, yes it does. Simply changing the From field to "Jeffrey" instead of their typical "Do502" increased their open rate from 16.2% to 20.4%, an increase of 26% over the "Do502" control From field. That 20.4% open rate is higher than any of their previous 4 months' newsletters.
Of course, it's hard to say if this same bump would happen in all markets - but thankfully, there's an easy way to find out. Hell, if DoLA saw a similar 26% increase in open rate, that would mean roughly 39,000 more people opening and reading their email per month.

See how many more opens or clicks you could get with a little more testing, as well as all of your other stats, in the Weekly KPI Report below:
Read More

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + More App Stats! - 8/10/15

No comments:

Winner of the Week:
DoTheBay + Do502!

DoTheBay nails the Outside Lands outlier + Do502 shakes up our app leaderboard.
To get right to the good stuff, here's our newly updated App User Leaderboard! Do502 stands at the top, but Do317 is poised for an upset as we head into week 3. Looking at straight up WoW growth, Do512 takes the top spot with 287 new users, and Do317 again takes home the silver with 229 users added. Nice work all!

In non-app news, DoTheBay secured a much-deserved Winner of the Week award thanks to them squeezing all the possible traffic juice out of Outside Lands this year.

Check it:
  • Outside Lands, by far DTB's biggest event, happens every year, right? Right. And every year Do415/DTB puts OSL stuff in their newsletter. This was last year's newsletter. This was this year's newsletter. Can you spot the difference?
  • Last year's newsletter: Led with a Beardyman interview as the first bullet point, then went on to talk about how Do415 powers the OSL lineup which you can use to plan your schedule. This year's newsletter: Plugs a free secret Toro y Moi show as a teaser for all of the OSL After Parties
  • That might seem like a crazy small detail, but it ended up being the difference in over 2,000 clicks! So while open rates stayed constant YoY, DTB was able to have their most clicked email of all time. In fact, they received more clicks than DoLA, Do312, and Do512, all of which have 3-4X more subscribers than DTB!
  • All told, this helped their traffic grow by 29% compared to last year, despite the official OSL site sending 64% less traffic last week than it did the same time last year. 
All of this can be accomplished by dialing in on what your email audience enjoys the most. Typically this is fests and free stuff. So if you have a show that your humble subscriber could go to for free and it's tied in with a fest, then that's a surefire email winner. Lead with that, and a click bounty awaits.

Check out how well your last email did, as well as all your other metrics in the most recent update to the Weekly KPI Report below:
Read More

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Product Update: App LearnStuff + Fixes For RSVP Lists, Old Venue Cards & More

No comments:
Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

App LearnStuff

Presenting: a dedicated section of our knowledge base for all things related to the APP. Head over to the DoStuff App section of LearnStuff for answers to FAQs, release notesknown issues and (perhaps most importantly) an updated list of workflow changes for content managers now that the app is live.


Have something you'd like added to this knowledge base? Just let us know!

Features & Fixes - Coming This Afternoon

We made sure that RSVP Lists are displaying all users in alphabetical order. Prior to this update, users who entered their names in lowercase were being displayed after all of the users who entered their names in uppercase. Confusing, right? Props to Kelsey615 for pointing this out.

We added a validation check to Radmin to ensure that users can not save an event with an end time that is before the start time. This will prevent a bunch of small errors (and also some confusion) that can arise from having an event end before it starts.

We removed the 'Your entry will also register you for DoXYZ...' language from giveaways and RSVPs on ECPs since that statement is no longer true (and hasn't been for awhile).

Quick review: All users who enter giveaways or RSVP on ECPs and do not have an account for the metro that powers that ECP are given the option to sign up for the metro after completing their entry (rather than being automatically registered).

A warning will now display when attempting to update a locked event in the dupes queue. Any locked event will also now have a 'locked' symbol beside the event title to indicate it as such. Please note that you will still be able to update locked events via the duplicate queue if you click 'OK' on the warning.


We set up unsubscribe links from band notification emails to look for all instances of a user's account on the metro. Prior to this update, users with duplicate accounts or duplicate preferences on a given metro were having trouble unsubscribing from band notification emails. Now, the 'unsubscribe' action will look for all accounts with the given email address and update the band email preferences on all of them accordingly.

We added 'topline info' to the list of fields that we can target via scraper rules. This was done specifically to fix some accent issues with a HazDF scraper - but this will be a valuable tool for every metro. Are you a CM and interested in learning more about scraper rules? Send us an email!

We prevented blank spaces from being accepted in RSVP passcodes. HazDF requested this feature so that users who accidentally copied and pasted RSVP passcodes along with a blank space would not have any trouble RSVPing to an event.

By popular request - Dev has worked some magic and adjusted /p pages to ensure that any 'old' embedded venue cards will now work correctly. We also recently adjusted venue cards to run off of venue IDs instead of venue permalinks - since permalinks change but IDs never do. Both of these updates mean that your venue cards should be much more stable going forward.

We fixed a glitch that was preventing event end times from properly saving in Radmin.

Tip of the Week

We all have a general understanding of the difference between the pending queue and the duplicates queue - but what is the best way to communicate the differences between these queues? What logic do scrapers use to decide where to put an event? 

For this week's tip, we thought it would be beneficial to draw out the process by which scrapers decide what to do with their incoming events.
A couple interesting things to note:
  • Incoming events are not validated against pending events - only approved events. That's just another reason why your Content Manager should bring the pending queue down to 0 at least 3 times per week. Otherwise, duplicate editions of the same event may sneak into the pending queue and end up on our site.
  • Two additional rules that operate in addition to the above process (but didn't fit neatly into the chart):
    • Scrapers also ignore incoming events that have the same venue, time, day of the week and title as an existing weekly repeating event. 
    • And scrapers ignore incoming ongoing events that have the same venue, title and end date as existing ongoing events. This rule was added recently - and if you've ever suddenly encountered multiple dupes of the same ongoing event on your site (I'm looking at you, DoLA), you will be very glad it exists!
If you have any questions about the scraping process or would like to see more diagrams like these, please let us know!
Read More

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + App Stats! - 8/3/15

No comments:

Winner of the Week:
Do214 + HazDF!

HazDF gets a round of APPlause + Do214 capitalizes on the Freemail.
First off, before we get into the exploits of a certain Dallas-based metro, we wanted to circulate the App User Leaderboard! We'll be sending that doc out each week to showcase the total number of unique users that have been to each metro's app (as recorded in GA), as well as the number of app users as a total percentage of email list (as a proxy for existing addressable audience).

With that, the first edition's leader is...HazDF! They've got 0.58% of their email audience on the app, but Do502, Do317, and Do503 are all nipping at their heels. Stay tuned next week now that active user outreach has kicked off, and the leaderboard could see a total shakeup!

Now, down to the Texas metroplex, where 100-degree temps and a well timed email have made Do214's subscribers all hot and bothered about free things to do.

Diving into the details, Do214 sent this email based on their dedicated template out on Tuesday last week, choosing to showcase 3 (and only 3) content pieces - Free StuffCraft Beer, andSummer Festivals. A smart selection of premium content, given that festivals and free stuff do universally well in newsletters across the network, and craft beer has been a consistent hit for Do214's audience in the past.

So, how'd it do?
  • Newsletter stats for the month prior - open rate of 11.13% and click rate of 11.57%. Stats for this content-focused email - open rate of 13.5% and click rate of 22.6%! Not bad to double your click rate in a single go. 
  • The quick boost in clicks meant that these 3 content pieces accounted for 38% of Do214's total site traffic for the previous week. Their free page alone accounted for 23% of traffic, receiving over 1K sessions directly from the email. 
  • All told, Do214 had a week of site traffic higher than their previous 10 weeks. 
The best part of all this is that those lists featured in their email are quick to produce + easy to maintain + in the case of the free and craft brew lists, can be trotted out regularly throughout the year as evergreen pieces.

The larger theme here is that Do214's little experiment is a clear case for our email design's migration towards a succinct content focus delivered more frequently, rather than the current fashion of cluttered comprehensiveness. We're hard at work internally on this and will be testing it when we launch Vancouver as our test market for Daily Emails, but reach out with your thoughts in the meantime.

Finally, as promised on the content Slack, a special double winner shout out for Do214, who drove the most traffic to their Lolla in Our Town page. You guys killed it this week.

As always, dive into all of your email stats and other metrics in the most recent update to the Weekly KPI Report below:
Read More

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + New App Winner - 8/25/15

Winner of the Week:
Do317 & Do210!

Indy Races To The Front  + Do210 Whacks the Traffic Pinata
It's late in the evening, but it's never too late to check out the newly updated App User Leaderboard. While Do512 still has the most downloads, Do317 edged by Do502 in % of audience on the app.

For everyone else - keep up the great work surfing the app request/feedback flood. Last week, we added nearly 15,000 new unique users on the app alone! Remember that down the stretch, it's going to be the app partnerships that make all the difference, so let us know in the tracking spreadsheet if you've got anything cooking.

Back in the familiar world of web Winners of the Week, Do210 quietly posted their highest week of traffic of all time. The event to thank? This Do210 theater takeover event featuring Pinata Protest.

Pretty simple why this was so successful, but some stats to put it in context:
  • The event page itself received a whopping 4,965 pageviews and 1.4K RSVPs since going live. Last week alone, the page accounted for 18% amount of Do210's total traffic. 
  • As is often the case with successful RSVPs, no one channel drove the majority of traffic. Instead, this event was a hit across Do210's audience, getting hundreds of pageviews across social, email, organic search, and especially from referral and direct channels.
  • More importantly, this event shows the power of using your connections and attaching yourself to a local band that has a serious draw in the community. Need more proof? Check out this last Pinata Protest-featured winner of the week for Do210. Of course, the free beer and snacks don't hurt either. 
All told, it was a packed house with people having a great time, and a week later, Do210's stats reflect just that. See how your KPIs fared in the updated report below:

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/17/15

Winner of the Week:
Do317, DoLA, & Do502!

New App Partnerships + Louisville Makes Good on ABT (Always Be Testin')
As is customary now that we're in the dawn of the DoStuff App, here's our newly overhauled App User Leaderboard (it's the same one you should've received earlier today). And while Do512 still has the most downloads and Do502 has the highest % of normalized audience, we thought we'd share a few wins from markets that have locked down some impressive partnerships:
  • Do317: Partnering with The Vogue to promote the app via their exclusive "12 Months of Shows" giveaway.
  • DoLA: Offering drink tickets to people who have the app on site at Echo Park Rising. This is part of their long term plan to offer app-exclusive rewards to early adopters of the app. Check out the nitty gritty.
Have a creative app partnership you want shared? Let us know by putting it in the partnership spreadsheet!

Outside of App Land, Do502 takes home the Winner of the Week this time thanks to capitalizing on some new Mailchimp testing functionality.

The long and short of it:
  • Thanks to Mailchimp overhauling their testing platform, you can now do things like testing 3 variations at once and easily A/B test entire blocks of your content without digging into the HTML
  • Do502 decided to use this to test their weekly newsletter with From fields of "Do502," "Amelia," and "Jeffrey." But can something as small as a From field make all that big of difference?
  • According to the data, yes it does. Simply changing the From field to "Jeffrey" instead of their typical "Do502" increased their open rate from 16.2% to 20.4%, an increase of 26% over the "Do502" control From field. That 20.4% open rate is higher than any of their previous 4 months' newsletters.
Of course, it's hard to say if this same bump would happen in all markets - but thankfully, there's an easy way to find out. Hell, if DoLA saw a similar 26% increase in open rate, that would mean roughly 39,000 more people opening and reading their email per month.

See how many more opens or clicks you could get with a little more testing, as well as all of your other stats, in the Weekly KPI Report below:

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + More App Stats! - 8/10/15

Winner of the Week:
DoTheBay + Do502!

DoTheBay nails the Outside Lands outlier + Do502 shakes up our app leaderboard.
To get right to the good stuff, here's our newly updated App User Leaderboard! Do502 stands at the top, but Do317 is poised for an upset as we head into week 3. Looking at straight up WoW growth, Do512 takes the top spot with 287 new users, and Do317 again takes home the silver with 229 users added. Nice work all!

In non-app news, DoTheBay secured a much-deserved Winner of the Week award thanks to them squeezing all the possible traffic juice out of Outside Lands this year.

Check it:
  • Outside Lands, by far DTB's biggest event, happens every year, right? Right. And every year Do415/DTB puts OSL stuff in their newsletter. This was last year's newsletter. This was this year's newsletter. Can you spot the difference?
  • Last year's newsletter: Led with a Beardyman interview as the first bullet point, then went on to talk about how Do415 powers the OSL lineup which you can use to plan your schedule. This year's newsletter: Plugs a free secret Toro y Moi show as a teaser for all of the OSL After Parties
  • That might seem like a crazy small detail, but it ended up being the difference in over 2,000 clicks! So while open rates stayed constant YoY, DTB was able to have their most clicked email of all time. In fact, they received more clicks than DoLA, Do312, and Do512, all of which have 3-4X more subscribers than DTB!
  • All told, this helped their traffic grow by 29% compared to last year, despite the official OSL site sending 64% less traffic last week than it did the same time last year. 
All of this can be accomplished by dialing in on what your email audience enjoys the most. Typically this is fests and free stuff. So if you have a show that your humble subscriber could go to for free and it's tied in with a fest, then that's a surefire email winner. Lead with that, and a click bounty awaits.

Check out how well your last email did, as well as all your other metrics in the most recent update to the Weekly KPI Report below:

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Product Update: App LearnStuff + Fixes For RSVP Lists, Old Venue Cards & More

Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

App LearnStuff

Presenting: a dedicated section of our knowledge base for all things related to the APP. Head over to the DoStuff App section of LearnStuff for answers to FAQs, release notesknown issues and (perhaps most importantly) an updated list of workflow changes for content managers now that the app is live.


Have something you'd like added to this knowledge base? Just let us know!

Features & Fixes - Coming This Afternoon

We made sure that RSVP Lists are displaying all users in alphabetical order. Prior to this update, users who entered their names in lowercase were being displayed after all of the users who entered their names in uppercase. Confusing, right? Props to Kelsey615 for pointing this out.

We added a validation check to Radmin to ensure that users can not save an event with an end time that is before the start time. This will prevent a bunch of small errors (and also some confusion) that can arise from having an event end before it starts.

We removed the 'Your entry will also register you for DoXYZ...' language from giveaways and RSVPs on ECPs since that statement is no longer true (and hasn't been for awhile).

Quick review: All users who enter giveaways or RSVP on ECPs and do not have an account for the metro that powers that ECP are given the option to sign up for the metro after completing their entry (rather than being automatically registered).

A warning will now display when attempting to update a locked event in the dupes queue. Any locked event will also now have a 'locked' symbol beside the event title to indicate it as such. Please note that you will still be able to update locked events via the duplicate queue if you click 'OK' on the warning.


We set up unsubscribe links from band notification emails to look for all instances of a user's account on the metro. Prior to this update, users with duplicate accounts or duplicate preferences on a given metro were having trouble unsubscribing from band notification emails. Now, the 'unsubscribe' action will look for all accounts with the given email address and update the band email preferences on all of them accordingly.

We added 'topline info' to the list of fields that we can target via scraper rules. This was done specifically to fix some accent issues with a HazDF scraper - but this will be a valuable tool for every metro. Are you a CM and interested in learning more about scraper rules? Send us an email!

We prevented blank spaces from being accepted in RSVP passcodes. HazDF requested this feature so that users who accidentally copied and pasted RSVP passcodes along with a blank space would not have any trouble RSVPing to an event.

By popular request - Dev has worked some magic and adjusted /p pages to ensure that any 'old' embedded venue cards will now work correctly. We also recently adjusted venue cards to run off of venue IDs instead of venue permalinks - since permalinks change but IDs never do. Both of these updates mean that your venue cards should be much more stable going forward.

We fixed a glitch that was preventing event end times from properly saving in Radmin.

Tip of the Week

We all have a general understanding of the difference between the pending queue and the duplicates queue - but what is the best way to communicate the differences between these queues? What logic do scrapers use to decide where to put an event? 

For this week's tip, we thought it would be beneficial to draw out the process by which scrapers decide what to do with their incoming events.
A couple interesting things to note:
  • Incoming events are not validated against pending events - only approved events. That's just another reason why your Content Manager should bring the pending queue down to 0 at least 3 times per week. Otherwise, duplicate editions of the same event may sneak into the pending queue and end up on our site.
  • Two additional rules that operate in addition to the above process (but didn't fit neatly into the chart):
    • Scrapers also ignore incoming events that have the same venue, time, day of the week and title as an existing weekly repeating event. 
    • And scrapers ignore incoming ongoing events that have the same venue, title and end date as existing ongoing events. This rule was added recently - and if you've ever suddenly encountered multiple dupes of the same ongoing event on your site (I'm looking at you, DoLA), you will be very glad it exists!
If you have any questions about the scraping process or would like to see more diagrams like these, please let us know!

How You (and the network) Did Last Week + App Stats! - 8/3/15

Winner of the Week:
Do214 + HazDF!

HazDF gets a round of APPlause + Do214 capitalizes on the Freemail.
First off, before we get into the exploits of a certain Dallas-based metro, we wanted to circulate the App User Leaderboard! We'll be sending that doc out each week to showcase the total number of unique users that have been to each metro's app (as recorded in GA), as well as the number of app users as a total percentage of email list (as a proxy for existing addressable audience).

With that, the first edition's leader is...HazDF! They've got 0.58% of their email audience on the app, but Do502, Do317, and Do503 are all nipping at their heels. Stay tuned next week now that active user outreach has kicked off, and the leaderboard could see a total shakeup!

Now, down to the Texas metroplex, where 100-degree temps and a well timed email have made Do214's subscribers all hot and bothered about free things to do.

Diving into the details, Do214 sent this email based on their dedicated template out on Tuesday last week, choosing to showcase 3 (and only 3) content pieces - Free StuffCraft Beer, andSummer Festivals. A smart selection of premium content, given that festivals and free stuff do universally well in newsletters across the network, and craft beer has been a consistent hit for Do214's audience in the past.

So, how'd it do?
  • Newsletter stats for the month prior - open rate of 11.13% and click rate of 11.57%. Stats for this content-focused email - open rate of 13.5% and click rate of 22.6%! Not bad to double your click rate in a single go. 
  • The quick boost in clicks meant that these 3 content pieces accounted for 38% of Do214's total site traffic for the previous week. Their free page alone accounted for 23% of traffic, receiving over 1K sessions directly from the email. 
  • All told, Do214 had a week of site traffic higher than their previous 10 weeks. 
The best part of all this is that those lists featured in their email are quick to produce + easy to maintain + in the case of the free and craft brew lists, can be trotted out regularly throughout the year as evergreen pieces.

The larger theme here is that Do214's little experiment is a clear case for our email design's migration towards a succinct content focus delivered more frequently, rather than the current fashion of cluttered comprehensiveness. We're hard at work internally on this and will be testing it when we launch Vancouver as our test market for Daily Emails, but reach out with your thoughts in the meantime.

Finally, as promised on the content Slack, a special double winner shout out for Do214, who drove the most traffic to their Lolla in Our Town page. You guys killed it this week.

As always, dive into all of your email stats and other metrics in the most recent update to the Weekly KPI Report below: