Tuesday, January 26, 2016

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 1/25/16

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 11:51 AM Labels: KPI Updates

Winner of the Week: DoLA!

If you're one of the 243,000 people that receives DoLA's newsletter, you may have noticed last week that your inbox stopped getting newsletters that looked like this, and instead got a sweet little daily package that looks like this. Big deal? Yep, big deal:

With 7,681 unique clicks, their very first email in the new format managed to tally an incredibly impressive click rate of 23.6%, their highest rate since we began tracking weekly email stats 18 months ago.
The vaaaaast majority of engagement (6,378 clicks) went to their giveaway to Dave Chapelle's sold out show. This event alone accounted for nearly 4K giveaway entrants and over a quarter of DoLA's traffic last week.
Bolstered by that initial email success and their subsequent email the following day with a Jenny Lewis giveaway, DoLA had their highest week of traffic in the last 5 months and a year over year traffic increase of 153%. Not too shabby.

DoLa is far from standing alone on this front, as Do312 also switched over to sending daily emails in the new format, causing the 2nd and 3rd largest email lists in the network to be fully transitioned over to dailies. As our good friend Mr. Chappelle might say, It's Clicks Biatch!, and they're there for the taking with improved email content and design.

A fresh set of stats, email and otherwise, awaits you below:

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 1/19/16

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 11:33 AM Labels: KPI Updates

Winner of the Week: Do317!

We're only a few weeks into 2016, but already Indy is tearing up the record book, thanks to notching their highest week of traffic by a long shot. Read below for the nitty gritty:

For those loyal readers of weekly updates, you might remember a certain Dewey-winning Weirdest Things in Austin piece. It turns out this content's success isn't limited to just self-described weird cities, as Indy found out last week.
Do317 debuted their Weirdest Things to Do In Indianapolis, and it made an immediate splash on social. To date, the post has been boosted for a little over $30, and it's racked in nearly 200 shares. A great job on Indy's part of using an intriguing share image, catchy title, and a juicy teaser of soon-to-open venues in the share text.
Final result - Do317 racked up 20K pageviews on the piece in 4 days, 75% of which came from social. All told, this post was enough to push Do317's traffic to 6.5K sessions more than any week prior, and more traffic than any other metro last week outside of Do512.

Think your metro can continue breaking the mold on which cities claim the weird adjective? All it takes is a well-researched local perspective, a smartly shared FB post, and some money to boost it.

Use the time that you would've spent watching the powerball drawing, and spend a couple minutes checking out how your metro stacked up in the DoStuff power rankings below:

Product Update: Deep Links, Content Meta Tags & 20 Ways To Make Your Email Blasts More Effective

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 2:29 PM

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.

Deep Linking Responsibly

Before beginning this product update, we wanted to check in and make sure that no one had any questions about deep links.

First and foremost you should only use deep links alongside a clear invitation to download the app (or to download the app to view content). The most important point being that it's clear you are sending your audience to a link that will prompt them to download the app whenever using a deep link.

The release of iOS 9.2 also introduced a new complexity: Now, iOS users who click deep links on various apps such as Facebook and Twitter will be brought to the App Store and invited to download or open the app in order to view the content - as opposed to having the link open the content directly in the app.

This new complexity does not affect desktop users, for whom deep links will still open the destination URLs as expected.

We invite you to review our how-to documentation - and please reach out if you have any questions.

When 'Beta Search' Become Search

We're removing the 'Beta' from our Radmin type-ahead search for events, venues, artists and people. From the next deployment forth, it will just be called 'Search'.

We'll also be removing the older, more inaccurate method of filtering in Radmin for venues, artists, people and events - except from within the pending and dupes queues (those filters will remain unchanged).

Updates To Content Meta Tags

We've historically appended ", (city) on (metro)" to the titles of all user and /p pages when they're shared and/or searched. Since the content looks a look cleaner without those tags, we're going to remove them:

Updates & Fixes - Coming your way on the next deployment:

We've added 'Pick Winners' buttons to the COG wheels in Radmin -> Events -> Search (formerly Beta Search).

We've ensured that all of a venue's scrapers will be displayed in Radmin -> Venues -> Search.

We've added more Spanish-language translations on our platform to better serve HazDF and to prepare for HazTJ.

What Big Projects Are Our Developers Working On?

In addition to all of the quick features and fixes, our developers spend most of their time working on large-scale projects that significantly move the meter for our network's audience and revenue. Here's an update on what they're doing:

1. Android app - coming soon!

The Android app is in beta mode and we're actively working on our launch plan (more info to come soon). Until then, feel free to recruit beta testers by sharing the following link (and please send us your early feedback): https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.dostuffmedia.dostuffandroid

2. Conferences/Festivals in the app

Soon both apps will have the ability to display festivals in very much the same way that metros do now. The festival will have its own tile on the "city picker" screen and a dedicated set of tabs, shortcuts, events, categories, and ads all specific to the festival. We're aiming to get this major update out in early February.

3. Feed Project (formerly known as the Push Notifications project)

As mentioned at the Summit, we're working on enabling push notifications in our apps, but we've expanded this in a really novel way. We are working on building a personal feed into the Discover tab in the app to show updates for the things that you follow. Users will get notified when important things get added. And yes, later we'll be able to leverage this functionality on the web too. Timing is end of Feb/early March.

4. New User Onboarding

We're also working hard on a better onboarding experience both in the apps and on the web so that we can build a stronger relationship with our users. For example, we're building in the functionality for people to connect to their Spotify and Facebook accounts, so that they can follow music and venues they already like. Creating accounts, messaging and the onboarding workflow will be cleaner and smoother. Timing is end of Feb/early March.

20 Ways To Make Your Email Blasts More Effective

This week's Tip of the Week is actually 20 tips - to better improve the deliverability and engagement of your weekly email. Do you follow all of these best practices?

Test your send times.
Test your subject lines.
Test your email content.
Check out your MailChimp Reports after each campaign. Where are people clicking? Where aren’t they clicking?
Include a mailing address in your footer (it’s the law).
Send a test of the final draft to yourself - and check every link.
Send tests to close friends and colleagues. Make sure they have a variety of mobile devices. Note that 53% of email marketing opens occur on mobile devices.
Run MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector on your campaigns.
Make sure your email isn’t clipping.
Add Alt Tags to all of your images.
Keep your calls to action clear and concise. Don't vanish them inside a long paragraph of text.
Keep a balanced image-to-text ratio and avoid using large images whenever possible.
Keep your most important call(s) to action above the fold.
Make sure your email’s font and color scheme clearly indicate where the links are.
Avoid saying ‘click’ whenever possible and let your design do the talking.
Keep in mind that, in general, the shorter your email is, the more deliverable it will be.
Avoid using ALL CAPS and multiple exclamation points whenever possible.
Include an invitation for users to whitelist your sending address.
Make use of email preheaders. They'e given more real estate on most email clients than subject lines.
Lean on us for graphic designs! We hired a new designer, Silke Kilian, near the end of 2015 and she is an absolute ace at email graphics. We invite you to email Support whenever you need a design for one of your emails (or just want us to make you a new set of header banners) - and try to give us as close to a one-week lead time, if possible.

Please let us know if you have any questions on the above - and have a great rest of your week!

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 1/11/16

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 8:37 AM Labels: KPI Updates

Winners of the Week:
DoTheBay + Do312!

Another week has flown by, and with it, two more exceptional performances from metros.

DoTheBay: The 36% click rate in the report isn't a mistake; DTB did indeed tally over 7,000 unique clicks in their newsletter last week, more than any other metro. Wanna know how? It was as simple as leading with the "Coachella in SF..." subject line, and then delivering on that promise in the email. Over 2.1K sessions came through on that link, which combined with giveaways to a Toro y Moi secret show (1.6K) and Bottlerock Fest (1.5K) to power DoTheBay to their highest traffic week in 5 months, and over 195% YoY growth. DTB has capitalized on their subscribers' love of festival news in their email before, so it's pretty great they could do so again with an out-of-market fest. And oh yeah, we build doxyz.com/coachella pages for every market, so all you have to do is push it out.
Do312: Things weren't too shabby in Chicago last week either. They saw their highest week of traffic in 4 months due to their 2nd and 4th highest organic reach posts of the last quarter. Venue openings/closings have historically played well on social, so no surprise there. But it was the runaway social sharing + email success of their 39 Chicago Bands That Kicked 2015's Ass piece that pushed them over the top with ~4K sessions. Along with some of their Jack Daniels sponsored pieces (coziest bars especially), Do312 managed to triple last year's social traffic this time of year, as well as double their overall traffic.

Didn't take advantage of Coachella in [metro]? We've got plenty more major Fest in Your Town pages coming your way this year. In the meantime, check out all of your freshly updated stats below:

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 1/4/16

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:18 AM Labels: KPI Updates

Winners of the Biweek:
Do317, Do512, and Do206!

Welcome to a whole new year of weekly stats! We missed a couple standout weeks for metros over the holiday, so we'll catch up and pay them homage with winner status below:

Do317: Indy capped off a strong year with their highest traffic week of all time, racking up more than 26K+ sessions last week. Before then, they hadn't had a week pass the 20K threshold. One third of that traffic landed on their New Year's list, which racked up 55K+ pageviews during December alone. Of the traffic that landed on the NYE list, 85% of it was organic, validating the importance of 1) building out comprehensive seasonal lists 2) getting other sites to link to said content 3) repeating with the same page each year
Do512: Over the past 3 weeks, Do512 has seen 60K more sessions to their site than they did over the same time last year. The majority of this increase was due to them rolling their long-running and incredibly popular "Rest in Peace Austin" content fromtheir blog over to their site. That was good enough to earn them 37K additional sessions, thanks to the wave of reminiscing on Facebook. Other markets are following suit; did you?
Do206: While the markets mentioned above closed out 2015 with oodles of traffic, Do206 was already looking ahead. Their first week of 2016 was their highest week of traffic in over 8 weeks, thanks to the success of their T.J Miller show as part of the Leafly program. Do206 set the bar for the other stops on the tour, with a solid 10K pageviews and 2.5K+ RSVPs on the event.

Now that we're all caught up, we'll have a special "highlights of 2015" update next week. In the meantime, check out the the entirety of 2015 app downloads and the last two weeks of 2015 KPIs below:

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