How we helped our DiveWire customers better understand the performance of their press releases
In 2021 Industry Dive launched DiveWire, a press release distribution service. While traditional newswires send announcements to an extensive network of journalists, there is no guarantee that a given press release will be covered. Without coverage, there is no guarantee that an announcement will reach its intended audience.
We created DiveWire to provide companies with an affordable option for the instant distribution of their announcements to 12M business leaders across 25 industries. For $249, a company or PR professional can build a targeted campaign and share their news in any of Industry Dive’s 26+ publications.
Unlike traditional newswire services, DiveWire ensures audience visibility. We promote company announcements in several locations across our publications:
- Featured spot in a publication’s daily newsletter
- Standalone announcement page on our website
- Listed in a press release feed on our website
- Displayed in the website sidebar and article footer for 21 days
- Optimized for and indexed by major search engines
Challenge
We received questions from customers about the performance of their announcements. The lack of audience reach data resulted in a decrease in repeat purchases from existing accounts and prospective customers were dissatisfied that reporting was not a feature.
Users Goals
To provide audience reach data to our customers, we created an automated performance report. To determine what to include in this report, we interviewed the DiveWire sales team, who work closely with customers. We discovered that customers wanted to know how many relevant people saw their announcement. We also learned that a customer’s press release has the most engagement on our platform in the first 7 days of their 21-day campaign.
Technical Research
Once we understood the customer needs and requirements, our next step was to find out what metrics we already had available to share. We met with our engineering team to understand the technical feasibility of creating a metrics report. The metrics that were immediately available included:
- Number of daily newsletter subscribers
- Monthly website visitors
- Confirmed newsletter opens
We quickly realized we would need to collect more data on audience reach to best serve the needs of our customers. In the interim, we focused on the audience data we had available. We also used our newsletter demographic data to provide deeper insight into the type of exposure customers could expect.
Implementation
When we began thinking about the structure of this report, we considered whether we should deliver it as an email or as a landing page with a unique URL. Sending the report as an email was initially considered because of the ease of implementation, but that would limit our ability to update performance data and add visual elements like graphs. We hypothesized that customers valued seeing the impact of their announcement over time, so we went with an option that would allow them to see a daily updated visibility metric.
The first iteration of the report covered the first 7 days of a campaign and was divided into five sections:
- Introduction — A place to call out the most important metrics, newsletter opens and newsletter subscribers
- Audience summary — A demographic breakdown of newsletter subscribers and the publication’s monthly website visitors
- Live placement — A live link to view the press release in the newsletter and website
- Press Release Best Practices — In case the client was not happy with their results, we shared four best practices to help clients improve future releasesPackages
- Call-to-action — A promotional placement for DiveWire packages to encourage repeat purchases
Progressive Enhancements
In the months following the release of the first DiveWire visibility report, we received a lot of client feedback. Customers were thrilled to receive this report, but they wanted additional metrics. To better serve the needs of our DiveWire customers, we updated the report design and included new metrics:
- Page views
- Total reach
- Weekly newsletter opens
With the addition of newly collected data, there was an opportunity to craft a story around the campaign’s overall performance for customers. The new tracking data allowed us to emphasize DiveWire’s value and demonstrate how a press release effectively reached its targeted audience. We restructured the architecture of the sections for better scannability, included charts and graphics to better communicate results, and added new labels and messaging to guide the customer more effectively through the report.
We also created a second, 21-day wrap-up report that is sent at the end of each campaign. This wrap-up report is entirely about the final numbers and signifies the end of the campaign. Rather than design an entirely new report, we created a modified version of the 7-day report with small changes:
- We added new labeling to inform the campaign has concluded
- Removed the live placements links from the campaign
- Changed the best PR practices section to tips for better public relations strategy
Conclusion
We worked vigorously for over a year to build this feature in an effort to earn and keep our customers’ trust. We created a scalable product that addressed the needs of our current customers and progressively provided the DiveWire team with concrete data to use to convert prospective customers. The creation of the visibility report helped achieve a 62.44% increase in new DiveWire customers in 2022. The visibility report will continue to evolve as we receive more feedback from our customers and add more features to DiveWire.
