Happy New Year!!!
Yes, it’s 2016 already and we are already in the second week of the very same year! We hope that so far, this year has been eventful, exciting and yummy, of course. Last year, in December we brought to you our first monthly report where we told you what was happening in Cucumbertown in November 2015, what things to look forward to and which bloggers to watch out for.
Now we bring to you what happened in the last month of 2015 and the promise of what will happen in 2016.
The events of importance were the following:
First Office Hour held
Invite from Medium team to participate in the Posts from the Future event
Optimised favicons for different platforms and browsers
Added feature to link affiliates within a post
Managed ads more efficiently through DFP
Introduced Intercom for help
Started Migration for Aparna Balasubramanian and Tarika Singh
Now for all of these in more detail
Cucumbertown Holds the first Office Hour and the Magazine is invited to write for Medium’s end of year special
We held the very first office hour in the second week of December, and had some of our bloggers in attendance. This was an interactive session between the team and the bloggers and facilitated a Q&A, which was frankly, a fabulous experience. We got to understand what the bloggers wanted from us and they got to meet the team. And it also was the day we were doing secret santa at CT. So as you can see, everyone was rather festive!
We also got invited to be part of Medium’s end of year campaign called Posts from the near Future, which was a collection of stories from various publications about what to expect in 2016. We came up with this post on the trends to expect in Food blogging, and what a fun idea this was!
Favicons and affiliates
One thing that Cucumbertown has always been focused on, is looking at the little details that will make blogging a great experience. We have also thought of user experience while making any major changes in the website. That’s why we knew optimising the favicons was an important task. Now, Cucumbertown bloggers simply need to upload a favicon image and it will be automatically optimised for the correct size on different web browsers and mobile platforms.
Here’s more on why favicons and their optimisation, are so important:
We now have the facility for bloggers to add affiliates as links within a post instead of having this as recommended products below or above a recipe. Here’s how that can be done:
Once the affiliate product has been added under the Affiliate Feature section, click on the link button as shown below:
When you do this, you will get a message saying ‘Link Copied’.
Now go into the post where you want this linked, select the text to be linked, and paste the link.
This will make it easier to have affiliate products in long posts, recipe round ups etc.
DFP For Ads
In December, we increased our ad impressions across more blogs using DFP. One of the interesting experiments we did is to use geo-targeting & key-value targeting to improve eCPM across specific locations. Some of the ad networks have differential CPMS for certain locations and this powerful targeting DFP feature helped us optimise a lot. You can read more about DFP targeting here.
We experimented with Google Matched Content, a unique content recommendation tool by Google which helps in promoting content on the blog as well as monetize the impression on a CPM basis. Since it’s an invite only tool and only one of our domains has this at the moment. What this has done, and the results of this move will be discussed in our next update.
Following up on our November update, we went live with the in-image ads on one of our blogs using Imonomy Ad Network. We did see an incremental CPM on these impressions, although mobile wasn’t optimized well. We would continue our experiment with other in-image ads networks like Vibrant Media & Gumgum although both of them have traffic (# of pageviews) criteria for inclusion. So not all blogs would comply.
And some good news around affiliates. As more bloggers adopted our new affiliate feature (currently partnered with Amazon only), we started seeing incremental revenue with average CTRs & conversions in line with industry standards (~1%-3.5%). As we partner with more vendors in 2016, we would definitely see this go higher.
Intercom for Help
By the end of December 2015, we decided to move away from the FB Messenger support system that we were relying on all this while. Now there is a Help button within Cucumbertown, that sends a messages directly to the team. We are quite excited about this and hope that this will help us identify issues more quickly and prioritise on tasks.
New Blogger Migrations
This month the migration team have their hands full. Migration has already started for Tarika Singh and Aparna Balasubramanian and more bloggers will soon be a part of the CT family.
Those are the big announcements for December 2015. We have already started work on the new Recipe Writer, which is expected to be released in a few months and Shrini is looking at more methods of monetization. This month’s Office hours will be happening in a few days time, and we can hopefully broadcast it for everyone by the next update (we lost connectivity halfway through last time’s session). So all in all, the year has started off with a bang and we hope to bring you more exciting features and updates all through 2016.
Stay tuned for more updates from Team Cucumber and don’t forget to Follow the Cucumbertown Magazine to keep track.
Until the next time, cheers, and Happy Food Blogging!
