Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Product Update: New Ad Reports, A Referral System, Email Capture Pop-Ups!


Our Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week. Here's what's happening:

New Ad Reports


The old ad reporting system is going away at the end of the month! We've built our own reporting system that we're super excited about - and here's why:

  • The old reporting system was powered by a third-party service called Keen, which frequently had service issues and/or downtime. The new system is far more reliable - meaning that it won't occasionally go offline and cause stats to go missing.
  • The new system is far better at tracking stats (especially impressions) - meaning that your ad numbers will be higher on a regular basis.
  • The new system allows you to export ad stats much more quickly than the old - meaning that you won't have to sit around waiting for the bulky old ad reports to load while you could be out selling.

Accessing The New Reports


We've left the old reports unchanged for now, so that you have time to get used to the new system and give us feedback on it before we remove the old one. To access the new ad reports, begin to pull ad stats as normal and then click this link once the 'Ad Reports' modal appears:


From there, you'll be dropped into a simple, speedy readout of your ad data.


We encourage you to check out the new ad system as soon as you can. A few important things to note about it:

1. The new ad reports stats will not be the same as the old reports. Across the board, they will almost always be higher (especially impressions - which may be as much as 3x greater) since we are tracking ads much more accurately on the new system, and not letting any stats slip through.

2. We do not yet have a way to navigate between advertisers on the new system (you have to start over from the Radmin Advertising screen) - but we will be adding that functionality very shortly.

Using the new reports for advertiser campaign recaps

The new ad reports are intended to be the quickest and easiest way to pull all the performance data you need for ads that run on your metro site and ECPs. They are not intended to replace campaign recaps you would send to an advertiser. In the same way that you would view and download data from Facebook Insights or Mailchimp, our ad reports give you the requisite data for you to combine with other channel data (email, social, etc.) to tell a compelling story of what you delivered to the advertiser during a given campaign.

To help with telling that story, we’ve created campaign recap templates for the following standard advertiser packages:


Have questions on how to work with those templates, or want us to tweak them to your metro? Reach out to support@dostuffmedia.com, and we’ll be happy to steer you in the right direction.

Referral System


Holy bananas are we excited about this! As you know, audience growth is our #1 priority of the year - and giveaways are the king of new user acquisition on our platform.

So, we are getting ready to roll out a giveaway referral system for the entire network. The referral system will allow giveaway entrants to earn extra contest entries for each new entrant they refer. More referrals mean more new users, and so on. And best of all, this system runs itself. No new work is involved.

Once referrals are turned on for your metro, giveaway entrants will see a new confirmation page that looks like this:


There will also be an invitation to refer friends inside of the giveaway confirmation email:


A note that the confirmation pop-up and email's 'share' links will also be referral URLs by default.

Every time that user successfully drives a new contest entry, (s)he will receive an email letting them know that they referred a friend. This email also includes an updated count of the user's total entries:


You will also be able to see each user's entry number (expressed as 'Score') on the giveaway's Pick Winners screen in Radmin:


You can sort your Pick Winners screens by score in order to easily select the user who drove the most entries as the winner.

Note: our developers concocted a new algorithm to also ensure that users with higher scores are more likely to appear on Pick Winners screen than others. All's fair in love and giveaways.

We’ll be rolling out the referral system within the next week. Stay tuned.

Email Capture Pop-Ups


More growth news! We've launched email capture pop-ups that allow (and encourage) users to sign up for our mailing lists directly from the sites. We've received a lot of requests for these from around the network - and so we tested them out on doNYC and Do615 to successful ends (around 3% overall conversion rate).

Users that sign up via these pop-ups will be sent a 'Welcome' email and automatically added to your main MailChimp list as normal.


The default text is shown in this screenshot - but if you'd like to personalize this text for your metro, just let Support know.

Tip of the Week


This week's tip comes to us from Victoria, BC - and the venerable Jimmy Leitch.

Did you know that you can click through on the list of 'Likes' that each of your Facebook posts receive...


... and quickly invite all of the users who liked the post to also like your page?


It's a great way to quickly increase your Facebook audience - and it's a simple enough method that even your beginning interns should be able to knock it out without difficulty.

Here's to growth!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thoughts to share? DO!

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Product Update: New Ad Reports, A Referral System, Email Capture Pop-Ups!


Our Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week. Here's what's happening:

New Ad Reports


The old ad reporting system is going away at the end of the month! We've built our own reporting system that we're super excited about - and here's why:

  • The old reporting system was powered by a third-party service called Keen, which frequently had service issues and/or downtime. The new system is far more reliable - meaning that it won't occasionally go offline and cause stats to go missing.
  • The new system is far better at tracking stats (especially impressions) - meaning that your ad numbers will be higher on a regular basis.
  • The new system allows you to export ad stats much more quickly than the old - meaning that you won't have to sit around waiting for the bulky old ad reports to load while you could be out selling.

Accessing The New Reports


We've left the old reports unchanged for now, so that you have time to get used to the new system and give us feedback on it before we remove the old one. To access the new ad reports, begin to pull ad stats as normal and then click this link once the 'Ad Reports' modal appears:


From there, you'll be dropped into a simple, speedy readout of your ad data.


We encourage you to check out the new ad system as soon as you can. A few important things to note about it:

1. The new ad reports stats will not be the same as the old reports. Across the board, they will almost always be higher (especially impressions - which may be as much as 3x greater) since we are tracking ads much more accurately on the new system, and not letting any stats slip through.

2. We do not yet have a way to navigate between advertisers on the new system (you have to start over from the Radmin Advertising screen) - but we will be adding that functionality very shortly.

Using the new reports for advertiser campaign recaps

The new ad reports are intended to be the quickest and easiest way to pull all the performance data you need for ads that run on your metro site and ECPs. They are not intended to replace campaign recaps you would send to an advertiser. In the same way that you would view and download data from Facebook Insights or Mailchimp, our ad reports give you the requisite data for you to combine with other channel data (email, social, etc.) to tell a compelling story of what you delivered to the advertiser during a given campaign.

To help with telling that story, we’ve created campaign recap templates for the following standard advertiser packages:


Have questions on how to work with those templates, or want us to tweak them to your metro? Reach out to support@dostuffmedia.com, and we’ll be happy to steer you in the right direction.

Referral System


Holy bananas are we excited about this! As you know, audience growth is our #1 priority of the year - and giveaways are the king of new user acquisition on our platform.

So, we are getting ready to roll out a giveaway referral system for the entire network. The referral system will allow giveaway entrants to earn extra contest entries for each new entrant they refer. More referrals mean more new users, and so on. And best of all, this system runs itself. No new work is involved.

Once referrals are turned on for your metro, giveaway entrants will see a new confirmation page that looks like this:


There will also be an invitation to refer friends inside of the giveaway confirmation email:


A note that the confirmation pop-up and email's 'share' links will also be referral URLs by default.

Every time that user successfully drives a new contest entry, (s)he will receive an email letting them know that they referred a friend. This email also includes an updated count of the user's total entries:


You will also be able to see each user's entry number (expressed as 'Score') on the giveaway's Pick Winners screen in Radmin:


You can sort your Pick Winners screens by score in order to easily select the user who drove the most entries as the winner.

Note: our developers concocted a new algorithm to also ensure that users with higher scores are more likely to appear on Pick Winners screen than others. All's fair in love and giveaways.

We’ll be rolling out the referral system within the next week. Stay tuned.

Email Capture Pop-Ups


More growth news! We've launched email capture pop-ups that allow (and encourage) users to sign up for our mailing lists directly from the sites. We've received a lot of requests for these from around the network - and so we tested them out on doNYC and Do615 to successful ends (around 3% overall conversion rate).

Users that sign up via these pop-ups will be sent a 'Welcome' email and automatically added to your main MailChimp list as normal.


The default text is shown in this screenshot - but if you'd like to personalize this text for your metro, just let Support know.

Tip of the Week


This week's tip comes to us from Victoria, BC - and the venerable Jimmy Leitch.

Did you know that you can click through on the list of 'Likes' that each of your Facebook posts receive...


... and quickly invite all of the users who liked the post to also like your page?


It's a great way to quickly increase your Facebook audience - and it's a simple enough method that even your beginning interns should be able to knock it out without difficulty.

Here's to growth!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thoughts to share? DO!