Product Update: Full Page Ads, Share Icons, Beta Search COG Wheels

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.

Full Page Ads

Radmin will now allow you to target full page ads to the app. Please note that full page ads will show up in exactly the same manner as 1/4 page ads on the app.

A reminder from a previous product update that if you struck exclusivity deals with any partners for the app launch, then you should remove all other ads for the first two months after launch. Then, add your regular partners back in. Make sure they all are fully aware of the new value they are receiving and use this as an opportunity to increase rates for 2016.

'Share' Icons

We recently realized that the 'Share' icons on event pages were adding an extra 20%-50% to page load times - and weren't being used nearly enough to justify their existence. In fact, we were averaging less than 10 shares total per day, on average, across the entire network.

Therefore, we decided to remove these icons and speed up our event pages.

Features & Fixes

We've added COG wheels to our Radmin -> Events -> Beta Search screens.

All of the functionality that you're used to seeing in the (old) event search COG wheels will now be available in Beta Search except 'Delete' - which is coming soon.

We added validation to advertising URL fields to prevent metros from saving ads with blank spaces before or after the URLs.

We discovered that if a metro added additional spaces to these URLs that it would cause the app to crash. So, we're making that impossible to do.

We are adding Recaptcha to HazDF.

Preparing to do this means that we've also completed the work required to add Recaptcha to other Spanish language metros going forward.

We also fixed a bug that was causing event start time to appear in the incorrect time zone in beta search.

Tip of the Week

Here's something every metro should do regularly:

Click the calendar icon in the top left-hand corner of Radmin to view any day's approved events, sorted by popularity.

From these screens, you can edit the popularity of each event (using the in-line editor) to add a personal touch to the order of your daily listings. Hard refresh after changing each event's popularity to see the new listings order for that day.

A few things to check (we recommend doing this for each day, at least one week ahead):

Are there any advertised events that need a bump in popularity?
Are there any off-brand events that are too high in your listings?
Have any 'main listings' weekly or ongoing events accrued too much popularity?
Are there any cool events near the bottom of your listings that should be brought to the top?

Remember that our popularity algorithms can only go so far. The rest of the work required to maintain a collection of event listings that fully embodies the culture and pulse of your city is up to you execute.

We'll be back with another Product Update next week.

Thursday, October 1, 2015