Last week, all metros combined had 436K sessions to their sites. Last year at this time? We were barely breaking 250K sessions. With my apologies for a delayed weekly update aside, let's dive into what metros did to drive that sweeeet sweet growth in arguably the most robust Winner of the Week digest in DoStuff history:

• Do206: Seattle landed the highest week of traffic in 14 weeks thanks to the success of their editorial in email, led by their guide to brunch, outdoor bars, and Chris Cornell tribute. Those pieces combined accounted for 40% of their email traffic for the week, and were the main reason they had 39% more email traffic than the week prior. Combined with a couple of social programs that went live for Upstream Fest and their brunch guide, Do206 had a bright week in an otherwise dark week for the birthplace of grunge.
   
• Do250: Victoria is in the midst of their seasonal upswing in traffic as they play host to their annual "Play Tall Tree Fest" competition.The content launched at the start of the month, and has had solid support from the festival throughout (launch, finalists, etc.). The "play the fest" contest is nothing new at this point, but hats off to the BC boys for another year of successful partnerships with a festival that looks to be doing all the right things.
   
• Do312: Chicago took their email game to another level and increased their WoW newsletter traffic by more than 40% thanks to the success of two content pieces that accounted for nearly a third of their weekly email traffic. While the entirety of their city lost their shit for summer temperatures, Do312 served up a diet of rooftop bar content not once, but twice. And with that, they shattered the metaphorical traffic roof when those pages became their 5th and 6th most popular email content pieces for the year. Props to the team for their continued hard work on honing in on successful email strategy.
   
• Do503: Oh hey, another metro that went buck wild on email last week. Portland fired a non-stop stream of festival giveaways into their subscribers' inbox and were rewarded with 34% more opens and 193% (!) more traffic than the week prior. What fests, you kindly ask? Sasquatch Last Call, Taco Fest, and What The Fest. Together, they accounted for nearly half of their email traffic for the week, and a 133% increase in total traffic over last year.
   
• Do604: If you read Do250's bullet point, then you can basically play audience growth madlibs and swap "604" for "250" and "Red Truck" for "Tall Tree." The contest went live. A lot of people shared it on social. Some quintessentially Vancouverian photos were submitted. And now Do604 is paddling their way to 470% YoY traffic. Oh and while you were busy, I dunno, reading about sand, Do604 grew their total subscriber base by 4K in a week. If you're still debating about the effectiveness of these fest contests, Vancouver has 27% of their list that can explain the importance to you.
   
• doNYC: While we're measuring list sizes, doNYC joined the 200K subscriber club this week. And it's that kind of subscriber growth that let them notch a dang impressive 342% YoY growth in traffic. Most of that came from a wave of email traffic to their VIP gov ball partnership contest, with other spikes of traffic for their gov ball set times announce and Panorama coverage. That content alone equaled the entirety of all of their email traffic from the week prior. And then you add 8K sessions coming from user referrals on the splash page, and you've got all the makings of a magic week.
   
• DoLA: Not to be outdone, DoLA shot past their previous weekly traffic record (50K sessions, set a few weeks ago) when they hit a phenomenal 69K sessions last week. That marked the launch of their Twilight Concert Series, an annual mega-event series linking from the official site to the RSVPs on DoLA. Total RSVPs on launch day are already up over 40% from what they were last year, which bodes well for a strong season for DoLA.
   
• DTB: And FINALLY, we get to DoTheBay, which had their first week of over 40K sessions thanks to some more tour dates from The Llama. When combined with their email features on...uh...where to see and be seen, DTB had 50% more email traffic than last week, and 148% more total site traffic than last year at this time. 

And that's just one week! Review any stats you haven't already checked out, and we'll do it all over again next week after we get back from the long weekend. Mazeltov - 

Last week, Tijuana was the beneficiary of the phenomenon of Maluma and his 22M followers. For comparison's sake, that makes him the 60th most followed artist on Facebook, with 3X as many likes as say...Kendrick Lamar. DAMN. That was enough to vault HazTJ into the top 6 metros by traffic last week; full details below:

• HazTJ had been promoting the show for the past month on Facebook, with it ranking as some of their most popular social content from March until now. That alone was good enough for hundreds of engagements on social and 1K+ users visiting the event page directly from social.
   
• However, far outpacing social performance was the organic traffic to that page. Anybody that searched some combination of "Maluma" and "Tijuana" saw HazTJ in the #1 spot on the results page. And the volume of that search traffic? More than 38,000 people ended up on that event page after Googling the concert info.
   
• Thanks to that influx of traffic, HazTJ had 8,361 BUY link clicks last week, 3K more than the second closest market. Even cooler, the number of people registering for HazTJ via the scrollbox prompt climbed from around 50/week at the start of the event's life to around 200/week at the peak of Maluma traffic. 

Similar to last week's Do314 winner, HazTJ's content stood at the crossroads of high search volume and low competition, and magic happened. Unfortunately, Maluma isn't making a stop at all of our metros, but it does again illustrate the importance of comprehensive content of all the important events going on in your city.

We'll be exploring ways this year where we can improve all of our content's positioning in organic search, but in the meantime, check out last week's newly updated stats below:

Last week was a particularly strong week for the network, as it was the first time we crossed 375K site sessions outside of SX weeks. In honor of that, we'll take a quick look at all 6 metros (and 1 bonus Winner!) that had double the traffic of the previous year:

• Do314: This makes it two weeks in a row that St. Louis has blown past their previous weekly records. And while last week was all about social love on their patios list, this week they benefited from a wave of people searching for information about the city's first black rodeo. Do314 stood on top of the search results and lassoed in a cool 1.4K sessions on that page alone. Another example of the organic search sweet spot of listing large events that haven't been around for awhile, since the search volume/interest will be high, and there's a good chance the competition will be relatively low. All in all, Do314 was up 148% compared to last year's traffic.
   
• Do503: Continuing in the grand tradition of metros branding their calendar dates, Portland kicked off their inaugural 5.03 week festivities. The biggest draw was their (un)Official Birthday Bash which featured music curated by What The Festival and booze from a local distillery, all free with RSVP. That event alone drove over 100 new users for them, and combined with the rest of the week's buzz, drove them to 281% YoY traffic. Now it's up to Do512 to keep the tradition going, and then Do604...if Canada didn't list their dates all backassward and write out June 4th as "04/6" :)
   
• Do604: Speaking of 604, they had a hell of a week themselves thanks to the popularity of yet another "play the fest" contest on social. This time it was the Play Motion Notion Mix Contest, which was promoted directly by the fest and then pinged around Facebook as the contestants promoted their submissions. When it was all over and done, 3.4K people viewed the page from social. Consequently Do604 had their highest week of traffic in over 9 months, and hit a sweet 230% YoY growth.
   
• Do615: Capitalizing on the always popular opportunity to break a secret show (or in this case, "secret-ish" show), Nasvhille unveiled Paramore's show announcement on Facebook to the tune of 50+ shares and a certain metro employee's unending anguish. Also popular in their email, where secret shows traditionally play equally well, this event alone received 15% of their traffic last week and propelled them on to 124% YoY growth.
   
• Do617: Boston continues to follow in the "Mo Giveaways, Mo Traffic" credo with Janet Jackson, Harry Styles, Halsley, and Die Antwoord leading the pack. All of which were promoted in the first content blocks of their emails, with the exception of the Harry Styles giveaway. That one blew up thanks to a wave of user giveaway referrals from a presumable army of tween fans. Together, Boston earned themselves a spicy 129% YoY growth.
   
• Do512: Bonus metro! Sure, Do512 didn't hit double YoY growth, but that would be pretty dang tricky given their historical performance. BUT they did do something badass and 100% replicable in other markets. Check out the this lineup promo action in the form of their Guess Who's Playing ACL contest. Over 14K people visited that page, making it their second most popular non-evergreen content post-SX. People dug it in email and on social, and helped Do512 break 100K weekly sessions twice in a row. And in the words of Jamie - "This idea stemmed from C3 wanting to put more promotion around their lineup announcement. After the lineup is announced at 6am and before tickets go on sale at 10am we'll pick our winners. It was pretty easy, we got paid, and it's getting a ton of traffic. "

Follow Jamie's lead and devote this week to things that fall in the category of "It was easy, we got paid, tons of traffic." Got ideas? We're here to help. And in the meantime, the stats march on:

Seasonal guides, email content hot takes, and a sprinkling of Facebook best practices - this week's got a little something for everyone:

• Do314: It's May already, which means it's high time to trot out your patios list. Do314 did exactly that on Facebook last week and tallied 1) the post with the highest organic engagement for the year 2) WoW social traffic increase of more than 3X 3) their highest week of traffic of all time. Similar content is blowing up across the network, so do likewise by posting your list to Facebook with a clear headline and concise post description. 

Which metros killed it in the email game last week? Glad you asked. 

• Do206: Upstream Music Fest Announce + Kendrick Win Before You Can Buy = Highest week of traffic in the last 3 months
   
• Do604: 10 best breweries list = 2nd highest week of traffic in last 9 months
   
• DoTheBay: Mega Onsale (expertly teased with "Dave Chapelle + John Mayer Surprise Show" subject line) + Kendrick = 49% increase in WoW email traffic and second highest week of traffic in last 9 months. Bottom line - if Kung Fu Kenny ever does a show in your city, lead your email with it. 

Ever want to see an automatically updating list of the most popular email content across the network for the year? That exists.

On an unrelated note of audience best practices - you've probably seen that Facebook got rid of the 20% text on share images rule for boosted posts a while ago. That doesn't mean go buck wild on adding text to your share images though. We did some testing for ad images with little to no copy vs ad images with the standard amount of copy for share images. An example would be this creative vs. this creative. The test found that CPMs for ads with less copy are indeed lower. The extent to which they were lower varied from 2% to 30% lower in the test. CPCs were less variable, but were in general lower without the copy.

The takeaway? Use the headline and description text sections of your posts to communicate value, and the share image should augment on that without a ton of copy in it. Of course, you can only do so much with the creative clients give you, but that at least gives you something to shoot for. Need an example? Scroll back to the beginning of this email.

Make your metro great(a) with data...last week's stats updated below: