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Paul Lee

Product Stories: Exploring new ways to present forum content

Paul Lee · Jun 22, 2020

Beyond our Search and Newsletter products, we are continually exploring how to better connect non-forum users with our customers’ communities.  Over the past year, we’ve partnered with several customers to test new ways of presenting forum content to increase engagement while also generating revenue.  Since nearly every forum includes discussions about products, we decided to see if we could make these stories more relevant to people outside of these communities.

For our first experiment, we partnered with AZBilliards, Home Theater Forum, TalkBass, and Windsor Peak Press.  Using a set of recent threads, we extracted canonical products, linked them to retailers, and grouped posts around each product.  This was a one-time effort (in other words, we didn’t update products or posts at all during the experiment).

We set up a site called Product Stories and generated traffic through Facebook ads.  We targeted non-forum, passive users, similar to what a forum might see from organic search.  Over the course of one week, we sent about 9K sessions to a product story on the site.

About 13% of sessions clicked on a product link, of which, about 1% purchased a product (Fig. 1).  The click-through rate was higher than we had targeted, but the conversion rate was lower. So an ok set of results – not stellar, not terrible.

However, we were much more interested in engagement and retention.  A low purchase conversion rate paired with high engagement and retention rates is more sustainable than the inverse.  Fortunately, the Product Stories engagement numbers were more interesting.  The bounce rate was 69% and average time on page was 4:22, both much higher than we had targeted.

Fig. 1: Percentage of sessions that engaged with the site

Exploring a Product story38%
Expanding a forum post40%
Clicking on a product link13%

Fig. 2: Google Analytics overview

More importantly, retention was significantly higher than average forum retention rates, both in the aggregate and at the individual forum level.

Fig. 3: Google Analytics retention data

The initial Product Stories results were encouraging, but also raised more questions:

  • What would happen if we promoted the products as the focal point (instead of the original post)?
  • In this experiment, we had included the full post text on https://threadloom.shop.  What would happen if we only displayed a snippet, and forwarded “more” clicks to the original forum thread?

In my next post, I’ll talk about our second Product Stories experiment, and what we learned.

Paul Lee
Paul Lee

I joined my first online community after my mom brought home a 386 and a 2400-baud modem from work. Since then, I’ve been drawn to communities that share a common desire to help each other. Threadloom is meaningful to me as a way to bring back mutual respect and personal dignity to the Internet. I’m excited to work with an amazing team that practices this daily in person.

www.threadloom.com

Announcing Threadloom List Builder for vBulletin and XenForo

Paul Lee · Jul 14, 2018

One year of Threadloom Newsletter

One year ago, we set out to build the easiest and most effective email newsletter service for forums.  The result was our second product, Threadloom Newsletter.  Today, millions of forum members receive weekly newsletters powered by Threadloom (the vast majority of which are sent via AutoPilot, which fully automates content selection, recipient curation, and delivery). We have since received thousands of emails from Newsletter recipients, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.Read more

Paul Lee
Paul Lee

I joined my first online community after my mom brought home a 386 and a 2400-baud modem from work. Since then, I’ve been drawn to communities that share a common desire to help each other. Threadloom is meaningful to me as a way to bring back mutual respect and personal dignity to the Internet. I’m excited to work with an amazing team that practices this daily in person.

www.threadloom.com

Threadloom is Privacy Shield-certified

Paul Lee · Jun 23, 2018

Over the past several months, we have published several updates about the European Union (EU) General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).  We have implemented a number of measures to further safeguard user privacy and trust, and today, I’m pleased to share another important milestone: Threadloom is now Privacy Shield-certified and on the Privacy Shield List.Read more

Paul Lee
Paul Lee

I joined my first online community after my mom brought home a 386 and a 2400-baud modem from work. Since then, I’ve been drawn to communities that share a common desire to help each other. Threadloom is meaningful to me as a way to bring back mutual respect and personal dignity to the Internet. I’m excited to work with an amazing team that practices this daily in person.

www.threadloom.com

New Threadloom Newsletter features

Paul Lee · May 23, 2018

I’m excited to share a number of improvements to Newsletter we’ve recently launched, as well as several new features and changes we have planned.Read more

Paul Lee
Paul Lee

I joined my first online community after my mom brought home a 386 and a 2400-baud modem from work. Since then, I’ve been drawn to communities that share a common desire to help each other. Threadloom is meaningful to me as a way to bring back mutual respect and personal dignity to the Internet. I’m excited to work with an amazing team that practices this daily in person.

www.threadloom.com

Update: Threadloom and the GDPR

Paul Lee · May 23, 2018

Last month, we wrote about the GDPR and what Threadloom was doing to prepare.  Below is an update on related changes.Read more

Paul Lee
Paul Lee

I joined my first online community after my mom brought home a 386 and a 2400-baud modem from work. Since then, I’ve been drawn to communities that share a common desire to help each other. Threadloom is meaningful to me as a way to bring back mutual respect and personal dignity to the Internet. I’m excited to work with an amazing team that practices this daily in person.

www.threadloom.com
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