30,000+ extra Mail web hits from the Barry saga
Wow!
Just asked for and received the latest figures for the web experience of birminghammail.net on last week's Barry story, and they make just as good reading as newspaper sales.
As we know, we only teased Barry's letter online initially with a come on for the print edition, thus preventing too early a copy-paste-lift by other sites, and generating huge publicity for the Birmingham Mail brand.
But as well as giving us a 4,000+ print sales lift, I'm told that last Wednesday also triggered 30,000 extra hits on www.birminghammail.net for the day!
This speaks volumes of the active involvement in this trial strategy from the Mail's web editors, a structured approach to maximise not only the potential of the story online but also in print.
To quote one of our sports-focused web editors, Steve Wollaston: "The initial tease on www.birminghammail.net with cross reference to the print edition [and later uploads] enabled office and home-based web readers to dash out and grab a copy of the biggest football story in the area.
"The aim was to allow those who could grab the paper to do so and then after the paper had hit the streets the digital team would launch the story onto the web for the ex-pat community, national community and those who couldn't get their hands on the paper.
"We teased the story twice before publishing in its entirety. Before it hit the web we got in touch with our contacts within the Villa online community and seeded the story accordingly.
"Throughout the day we maintained a vigilant watch on other web sites who may have 'got their hands' on a copy of the letter, in certain situations we contacted websites to ensure that they credited us with the exclusive and indeed didn't publish our exclusive copy.
"When it became clear that a rival had indeed typed the letter in and put it online we put out our full version of the story and, using good SEO techniques, managed to stay ahead of the game and hit the top of the Google News rankings.
"The result online was a combined total of roughly 30,000 extra hits for the day and the best daily performance for the website in 12 months.
"Subsequent spin-off stories and user-generated response stories have kept the momentum going and resulted in an excellent run of figures for the website."
Working with Steve on this activity on-day was Anna Jeys, Steve Nicholls and their boss, David Higgerson.
What a team!
Older/Newer
« 4,000+ sales lift from Gareth Barry exclusive | Sunday Mercury reaches for the stars »
5 Comments
Leave a comment
Profile
Steve Dyson - Blog from the Editor on recent issues and events.
Is that why your top story is now telling readers to buy next Wednesday's Mail for fixture lists for the new season. Will these fixtures be on the Mail site this year, or will we have to go elsewhere for them?
Kind of, but not exactly. The timings of the fixtures happen to be perfect for our deadlines. They come out mid-morning, and so it makes sense to place the content in and make mega news about that unique selling point for all on-day editions. For info, though, we have to pay the football authorities for the licence to do so, and this fee would cost more if we were to use online. So, for different reasons, it's a kind of print exclusive next Wednesday, for a limited period, which just happens on this occasion to be when our papers are sold that day! So, like I say, kind of. A different, one-off scenario... but then all these rare cases should be treated case-by-case. The end result will see a massive spike up in sales, as per every year the fixtures are announced.
Nice to see your football writers get a mention -not! Without their contacts, hard graft, ability to get the inside line first and consistently as well as those live blogs/chats I dread to think what your figures would be like!
Good point. Bill Howell, Colin Tattum, Chris Lepkowski, Lisa Smith et al, come take a bow. Seriously, folks, most of them run blogs on this same site and are all worth a read.
It is very great article. Article is provide good Mail web hits.