Winners of the week travels south for a flurry of activity in Mexico City:

• For a while now, HazDF has been notching strong year-over-year returns thanks to organic search traffic from people searching for venues and events around town. However, last week was especially high traffic for them, as they hit site traffic more than 3X what they recorded last year. 

• Their most popular page for the week was their anniversary party, an event that drew 380 RSVPs for people to attend a special drunk Pictionary party. HazDF partnered with the locally popular Drink & Draw DF, which helped spread the love on Facebook and host the event to the tune of a few hundred attendees. HazDF promoted from their end and handled securing the prizing of vinyl, tickets, free dinners, etc.
   
• On top of all the anniversary hubbub, HazDF ran a social campaign earlier in the week for Dia #Hazgratis, in which they partnered with several venues to give tickets away hourly from 9am to 9pm. 

Nice work HazDF on an all-around great week! Also, for those of you that are wondering what to do during holiday slow weeks, a quick hit digest of what metros that had the highest YoY traffic (besides HazDF) capitalized on last week:

1. Do617 - 214% growth. Early announce on Kenny Chesney giveaway via social. Users that enter and then refer their friends account for the majority of site traffic for the week, as well as 85% of their new users from giveaways. Much the same as last week's success. 
2. DoLA - 208% growth. Email traffic was 4X what it was last year this time. Most popular content was their 30 days in LA prize pack giveaway including a custom bike.
3. Do615 - 112% growth. Nashville took advantage of some holiday giveaways with a Thanksgiving weekend giveaways round up, their most popular email content. Also they got a nice bump of organic search traffic to their restaurants open on thanksgiving page, which they built last year, but received 3X more traffic this year.  
4. Do214 - 109% growth. Continue doubling down on big show announces in their email, with this newsletter being their most successful for the week. Subject line of "Huge Announcements Willie Nelson, Bruno Mars, Sting, Juicy J, and More." Believe it or not, Bruno Mars was the most clicked content of the week.

After you're done scanning through the above to see what you can implement in your market, check out your stats from the week prior and hit us with any questions:

It wouldn't be a holiday week without a heaping portion of winners, and we've got two piping hot ones to share with ya:

• Do615: Nashville became the 13th metro to fully switch to daily emails last week (they had been sending 3X per week previously), and, much like Ciara, the bump was immediately apparent. Last week marked their highest week of traffic in 9 months, and their 2nd highest week of traffic of all time. All thanks to a cool 451% YoY increase in email traffic.
  
  Of course, it takes more than just increasing frequency to hit numbers that high. In this case, Do615 timed it perfectly with the unveiling of their Golden Ticket campaign, which drove nearly half of all email traffic last week. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it involved promoting a chance to win tickets to every show at a given venue for the remainder of 2016. Pretty slick way to offer an engaging and novel giveaway during the slower time of the year. 

• Do617: Not to be outdone, Boston had their all-time highest week of traffic last week thanks to some giveaway virality. Specifically a giveaway for the aptly named "Total Package Tour" of NKOTB/Paula Abdul/Boyz II Men, an event that accounted for more than half of their total traffic for the week. 
  
  And while Do617 started the traffic avalanche by being the first to announce the show on social (check the 242 shares), you might be surprised that neither that post nor their newsletter that day were the largest traffic drivers to that event. Instead, a whopping 3.8K sessions were driven by individual users sharing the giveaway with their friends via our referral platform. And even better, those sessions converted into 1,575 new users! Kudos to Boston for showing the power of the giveaway referral platform.

We're here to answer questions on the best way to harness the power of giveaways, be they golden ticket, stadium show, or network-wide festival campaign. In the meantime, check your stats from last week below, and have a great time tryp(tophan)ing balls this week,

We've got a couple of wins worth highlighting as we head into the holiday season, from shows that just got announced, to shows happening right this very second. All the info:

• Do512: Over the last 3 months, Do512 has had 6 posts that have reached over 100K people organically. Two of them were content produced by media outlets other than Do512 (like this). The other 4? All of them were live streams of events they produced. In order of organic reach they were:

1. Sound and Cinema - 452K reach
2. Do512 Lounge - Taking Back Sunday - 203K reach
3. Do512 10 Year Anniversary - Post 1 - 140K reach
4. Do512 10 Year Anniversary - Post 2 - 104K reach
   
   Do512 has teamed up with a local streaming company to produce all of their live coverage of events, with their success continuing through last week's 10th anniversary party. We've mentioned this recently before, but lots of engagement to be had on FB for those that can successfully live stream shows or produce video content. Want to get this started in your metro? Hit us up and we'd be happy to advise. 

• Do416: Toronto had their highest week of traffic in 3 months thanks to also notching their highest clicks and opens in over 3 months. The difference maker?  The "Just Announced Shows" section of this email. A whopping 73% of the email's clicks came from that section, with Amy Schumer, Stars, and Run the Jewels leading the way.
  
  Interestingly, the CTA button only accounted for 7% of the emails total clicks, further proving that users especially prefer specificity when looking for Just Announced/Big On Sales. We're running several tests on how to best present lists of multiple shows in your daily emails, but we can always run more! Reach out if you'd like to test in your market, and we'll be communicating the results of the winning tests with you as they happen. 

We've got lots of big things planned on the audience front for the remainder of the year, but in the meantime, dig into your stats from last week:

Welcome back from summit! It was great seeing the whole posse in town, but now time to return to our various corners of North America on our quest of DoDomination.

And if you took one thing away from the audience panels in summit this year, hopefully it was the importance of nailing your daily emails, as it's the largest piece of the growth pie yet in 2016. We'll be doubling down on testing efforts to continue surfacing best practices, but in the meantime, check out some metros that are already doing great things:

• DTB: More and more we're seeing that not only including the right content matters, but choosing the correct format is just as important for driving sustained engagement. Case in point - this Lauryn Hill giveaway anchored a content block that collectively received 803 total clicks on October 28th. The content block accounted for more than a third of that email's clicks, in an email that was their highest click rate of the past two weeks. So good content in an overall good email. However, that doesn't mean that DoTheBay was done with Ms. Lauryn Hill.
  
  A mere 5 days later, DTB ran a "Last Chance" giveaway content block calling out the last day to win tickets to the same show, and wuddyaknow - another 979 total clicks. That's right, more clicks than the previous week's content block that included it with several other giveaways. That combined with an Anderson.Paak giveaway and Weeknd show announce to propel them to a solid 2X traffic of last year on 360% YoY email traffic growth last week.
  
  Lessons? 1) Use lists of giveaways to see which ones users are interacting with the most, then run the most popular ones again as "last chance giveaways" and 2) Users love specificity; and you can often get more engagement from a clear content block with one CTA rather than a jumble of things.
   
• Do214/DoLA: A quick hit on another two metros seeing 125 to 200% YoY traffic growth on the strength of email. Dallas had their single highest day of email traffic dating all the way back to June 30th thanks to the launch of their "Beer Sleepover" giveaway in partnership with Untapped Fest. DoLA kept things topical with the impending vote on marijuana legalization by pushing out their 10 best dispensaries list. It received 25% of their email traffic for the entire week and was the main reason they had triple the email traffic of last year. 

Lots more email learnings and trends that we'll be pulling out through the rest of the year, so get ready! Have something you want to test on your email...or any kind of growth test idea at all kicking around your head after summit? Send 'em to us!

And as always, weekly stats await: