AI-Powered LocalCalendar: How SalemReporter.com Became the Go-To Events Destination

How's the calendar affected website traffic and was there a change after they promoted the calendar?

Yep. So turning on the calendar right away. Within a day, the events started to rank in Google and traffic started to come in through the back door on SEO searches. So, Salem City Council meetings, Salem events, whatever. Welcome to the Paywall podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode.

Okay, so we're going to talk about the local calendar function on Salem Reporter. So the question is, is what has the impact been on Salem Reporter since the calendar has been running? And how long has this calendar been on here?

This calendar has been on for maybe two months at this point. This is February 26, 2025. So two months of this.

Two months, Yep.

So right around Christmas, I believe, is when this was turned on. So the immediate impact internally. Wait, next question.

How many events have been posted in.

Two months roughly, or can from individuals or just overall?

Let's just say through the automation. Through our automation.

First, at any given day, there's around a thousand events on the site. So, okay, I would say there's around 200 plus per day that get updated and added. So how many of them are brand new? Maybe 25 to 50.

Okay, so 25 to 50 new events per day.

Per day. Of course, there are hundreds more that get updated throughout each update. So maybe a location change, maybe a event description change, maybe a, you know, an image change for promotion from the, from the source. So there's constant adjustment updates for existing events. So as you can, as you can see in this, like, yeah, you can see that that second event says rescheduled, so that that event has been adjusted because. Yeah, so it's constantly repulling the same events over and over to make sure there's no, like.

Yeah, and then so it's looking, it's finding the same event, seeing that there's a, there's a new time or that's.

Yeah, it's looking for all new content. So the things that mainly stay the same, like if you're, if you get into the tech side of it, are the links from the source. Yep. But everything else can change. The title could change, the date could change, the location can change, the image can change. All of it can change. So. And after that happens, it just updates and it doesn't Create duplicate events. That's awesome. Yeah.

So this reschedule event is obviously been.

Updated because it's at a different time.

And that gets pulled in. That's. That's fantastic. So I assume you don't have any data on how many events get updated per day?

Yeah, hold on. I don't know to what extent it updates. Like, they all get updated, but like, how many of them are actually getting updated? Right, that part I don't quite know. We'd have to look deep into the logs to see exactly what happens, but I would say like around 10%, 5% probably. Okay, maybe. Maybe on the 5% side, get changed, like on a daily basis, something. Something changes somewhere. Right. So, okay.

I'll say updated with changes.

Yeah. Okay. And then total.

Total number. Can you see the total number of events that have been published since two months ago?

Let me. I'll just. Let me take a look. So just, just so you know, when the events come in, after they end, we automatically delete them so that the publisher doesn't have like 20 kajillion events that are forever hosted until eternity. Because from an SEO perspective, Google doesn't really care after the date passes. From what I found, they don't really want that data anyway. So. Right. As far as how many events have landed since.

Would you say one month?

Yeah, let's see. Yeah, two months. We'll do one month. Just a moment. I would say that's a difficult question to answer.

Okay, so how many. How far back does the event data live now? Two months.

Well, it goes back as far as each event. Like, as it occurs, it drops off, so.

Oh, it gets. Just deleted once it's actually drops off.

That's right. Yeah. Once it's. Once it's stale, we don't keep it in the system anymore because otherwise Salem would have like, probably thousands of events. So in that case, probably, I would say thousands of events have been imported in the last two months.

Yeah, I mean, if you're running, you know, 50 events a day times 30 days, that's 1500 right there. Once, that's 3000. If it's half of that, if it's actually only 25 events per day, then that's 1500 events that have been posted.

Yeah. So, okay. Yep. Yep. And this all you know is based on what the publisher needs, like which sources they need to pull from. So it could be way more. In the case of Salem, Salem's only pulling from a few sources to get to that. Got it. Right.

So you could plumb in more sources if you need.

You could get nuts with this. Yeah.

Really get granular with all these. But no requests from them, like, hey, let's get some more events.

You know, so what I did, and this was before having a third party helper on the extraction side, I just went through and searched every event. Like, I just typed in Salem events and went through all the sites, and then I checked to see where they are. Are they on Facebook? Are they on. Where are these people? Where are. Is Salem? Where. Where's the city of Salem posting? Where. Where are these events? And it seemed like, you know, this batch of, let's say, five sources covered what seemed like the majority of events in the community, and there's still quite a few that aren't on there. There's like, local schools and. And other things. But Salem wanted to focus on, like, city government and, you know, events in the community, so that was a priority for them. Versus. Versus, like a trillion middle school events and basketball events and things like that would just blow your calendar off the charts. Right, so. Right.

Which could be its own separate event calendar, really?

Most certainly could. Yeah.

Okay, now here's another question. The ability to add your own, post your own event showed up on the calendar, I think, from day one. Right.

It did. Day one.

Okay. And any sense for how many events have been added manually from locals at this point?

And say 50 plus, at least.

Okay, 50 plus. And just to give it a little context, this calendar was essentially turned on, not promoted in any way, or was it promoted by Salem Reporter?

This wasn't promoted until probably about a month ago, like formally through their newsletter.

Okay.

To. To their audience. We were kind of pushing this data in through a backdoor on a page that wasn't promoted. And. And just to make sure it all worked.

Of course, that makes total sense. So it's a soft launch for 30 days, and then. And then it's promoted and then 30 days later. So was there. Was there. Let's talk a little bit about traffic. Was there a difference? Two questions. What it.

What.

You know what. How did. How has the traffic behaved or affected. How's the calendar affected? Website traffic? And was there a change after they promoted the calendar?

Yep. So turning on the calendar right away, within a day, the events started to rank in Google and traffic started to come in through the back door on SEO searches. So Salem City Council meetings, Salem events, whatever. Salem Reporter was outranking a lot of the sites we were pulling from.

That's amazing.

And partly because of the AI that we're using to help format and clean up the mess that is every calendar on the Internet and pulling it into a format that's readable and digestible into WordPress into an events calendar system. So yes, they were seeing like, I don't know, let me, let me just, just pull it up and we'll just go through that together. But it was certainly a noticeable shift in traffic, at least a noticeable gain in traffic. Let me just, I'm going to pull up this.

Do you have a, any kind of a guesstimate in terms of.

Yep. So I'm going to do the last 12 months, but I only need the last couple months. There we go. All right. So overall, just internal just for us or does it matter?

Yeah, we can, we can edit as needed.

Okay. So since they turned it on, around 16,000 page views have been distributed to the event universe. Whether it's the main events calendar page or an event link like slash event link. With the vast majority coming direct, which is kind of nuts. And also through Google. Google with the events calendar main page being the hot, the hot page for.

Writing at this point, the homepage. When you say majority is direct traffic, what does that mean?

People coming to Salem directly just like, okay, they've, they've gone to Salem.com and.

They'Ve, it's finding the event button.

They're just clicking on events in the menu.

Got it.

Yeah.

Like, hey, what's going on?

Yeah, yeah. And then number two would be Google like by, by a long shot. They're like the.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. And, and with that really quick, just a little nugget of data here, 4% bounce rate on, on that events based pages. So the bounce rate is just like people see this stuff and they, they, they browse around.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

I was looking at UV here, the UV here calendar. And even though there's not a ton of traffic on there, the average is, the average visit looks at over four pages, four events essentially. So people want to know what's, what other events are going on.

They love it. They don't stop at one. They see that you've got one and they're like, wait a minute, I wonder if they've got more. And then they kind of meander around and the same is happening with the hello Morgantown site. You know, people find it and they're like, wait a minute, this is better than the university's calendar. It's better than this other calendar. Right. And it's all in one spot. Ah, great. I can just use this. Let me just use this and. And Right. That's, I think, partly why we're. Why we're seeing like, an uptick and ranking on that site to the first page of Google. So.

Yeah, that's amazing. Can you tell if certain categories are getting hit on Salem?

More like categories. Categories of, like, event types.

Yeah, event types. Right. So yeah, back here and look at. Drop down the category list. So we have a variety of categories here.

Which.

Which covers, I think, the majority of types of events. Go look. Go look at food and drink.

Let me put a wild card in the search and I'll see.

And then you get. You get whatever events are coming up for that category.

I'll have to check on how to find that data. But no, I don't know which one's most popular.

Okay, that's fine.

Just curious. Yeah, just curious.

And then. Okay, so as far as traffic goes, do you have a sense of the percentage of extra traffic that the calendar has generated?

Yes.

Versus the traffic on the site without having a calendar?

Yes. So let me give you a quick update on that. Boy. Salem's traffic has ballooned this month, up 30%. So let me just take a look at where that traffic is. Yeah, Salem's had some, like, ice storms and winter storms and like, blooding and all kinds of crazy stuff. Let me just put in there. Slash, event stash. At this point, it's probably less than a percent of overall traffic.

Okay.

Earlier in the month it was higher because their traffic overall was lower. They had some, like, ginormous stories that just, like, rocketed their analytics to almost a million page views. So.

Yeah. Okay.

But depending on, like, normal traffic, they can see 5%, sometimes more than that of overall traffic coming from the events calendar. Mm. So.

So less than 1% to 5%, depending. Kind of a variety of variation.

Yeah. Again, it really depends on if you don't have breaking news and have like, a right. Surge of regular traffic kind of offsetting the two before. Like in December and January. January when there wasn't a lot of. Yeah. Breaking news. They. We're seeing closer to the 5% large right now.

Okay. So that's interesting. So the other thing which is a bit of a variable and kind of affects this data, makes it a little murkier, is that there's the ability to subscribe to event notifications, and then any of that kind of traffic may go to an event, but also may go off to regular news as well.

Right.

Do we have any feel for our people signing up for notifications?

They are, and there's been no Promotion of this. I haven't actually even mentioned this feature to Salem yet. They let me guinea pig a lot less is. Is really kind in that way. If you're looking at this, this is a new website for Salem. Whoever's internally looking at this video, they are really good about letting us guinea pig new things. As far as how many people have signed up for different event lists, I'd say each one of those lists on average has about 15 people. So 15 times whatever you see there. And again, there's been zero promotion that this is the only spot on the site you can sign up to an event email newsletter. And boy, do people open these event newsletters. So the average open rate is north of 60% on all of them. So some of them, 72%, 64%, 52%, 73%. Like, people open them religiously, even though it's only a small 15, you know, people in those lists.

Yeah, well, yeah, so you have a little. Somewhere north of 150 people have signed up for a category notification.

That's right. Location with zero promotion at the bottom of the page. Kind of hard to find. Yep.

That's pretty good for two months and no promotion. And these are, you know, these are locals who want the news on a specific topic and they're. They're getting it potentially on a daily basis.

They are, yeah.

Yeah.

Most of these calendars, these lists send out almost daily. I don't like, for the most part, they're. They're getting a daily dose regardless of the category. And this. This particular function's only been live for about three weeks, maybe four weeks at this point. So it's not.

Oh, the newsletter category.

Yeah, it's not quite as.

Okay. All right, so three. Three weeks. That's not very long. Okay.

Yeah.

And no. And no promotion. Okay. Hard to extrapolate that, but it sounds pretty great.

Yeah.

And you have. You just have all that extra traffic going back to the site.

Yeah. And that's where the AI magic comes into play here because it's sorting the content, putting it in the correct category, and then because we know the category, then we can send out automated newsletters to write specific event, you know, desires from the audience. Right.

That's fantastic. And we haven't. Something on the roadmap I know is that is advertising. So featured events. Yeah, we haven't. We haven't tackled that. We have the featured event function in production. It'll be ready probably in the next month or two, and that'll give.

Those.

That submit events the ability to pay and have the event immediately posted instead of going into moderation, which the free events do. And then that immediate posting will be flagged as featured on the site as well.

Yep. Think of it as a sticky. A sticky event or sticky event. The old school forum, you know, advertising that would go to the top of a sticky thread. And like, that's. I think that's kind of what we're thinking as far as. Yeah. Like where that data will land on any given category. So.

Yep, that one makes total sense.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we know that works. I've been talking. I mean, we did this ourselves with UV here 10 years ago and, And. And like King Arthur Flower was looking to advertise. But I also recently talked to a publisher and we. Very specific conversation about this. I won't mention who they are, but they built. They built an events calendar for very dense, urban, populated area and they were absolutely selling featured events. But the whole. This was years ago. There was no AI. The whole process was completely manual and it fell apart because it was just too much data. There was, it was just too much work putting it together.

Yeah. Now we have the opposite kind of, you know, the more data the better. Like, bring us as much as you can and let us. We'll. There's no, there's no issue with the sorting part. We just need to define a reliable source. That's the key for. For this system to work. Yeah.

And we, We. That's what we need now. We need. Curation is essentially what we're doing. Curating events and.

Yeah. Because even Facebook's not enough to. To do it all. They're close. They do like, you know, I'd say, like in most communities, like, they'll get you 70% of the way there, but there's still 30%, which I would consider the gold in the community that's not on Facebook that they're looking for, that publishers need and want. And so at some point we'll look through the data and see which events Salem is, you know, getting eyeballs on to verify that claim. But I'm. I'm almost certain that like, most of the event views are coming from the stuff that you can't find on Facebook easily.

Right. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I just think locally here and Facebook is picking up a bunch of stuff, but they're not touching any town hall stuff. Nope, they're not. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't get submitted that they don't pick up. That's, you know, music or restaurant events or, you know, there's just. There's just so much going on. I had a friend of mine who was like, oh, I see Cub Scout events are showing up on. On. Because it's coming from Facebook. Right. Somebody's been submitting local Cub Scout events. Okay, that's. Or Boy Scout events. And that's great. But not everybody's doing that.

Yeah. And that's the goal with these calendars is to like, let's get to like 90% coverage and then that 10% gap can be the, like the event submissions that aren't anywhere on the web. Uh, they're not posted anywhere, they're not promoted quite, you know. Well, on Facebook or whatever and.

Right.

And you'll see that with Salem, like Salem did no promotion on that little submit event link at the very bottom of the calendar. And people still find it in. Right. It's like people will find that button. They don't care. They want their event to be on this calendar and. And then Salem will approve it. Yep. You know, to make sure it's legit. Yeah.

That's amazing. I mean that's. It's not even, it's not even in the dropdown, is it?

No, no, it needs to be. We're going to add it there. Just. Yeah, we're mainly kind of testing the form and making sure that it all works. Cool.

All right, so last question. Have you gotten any feedback from Salem about the event calendar.

Other than just the amount of time that they're saving? That was like the biggest. Like when we launched this, they were just like, oh my gosh. Right. You can have this done without us having to do it. That's great. And they still write stories about events like the editor and the publisher or whatever. They still publish event based articles, but now they have a library of data that they can draw upon and say, oh yeah, this is happening, this is happening, this is happening. Great, done. And they can add their editorial flair to the event that is in there.

That's true, that's true. That's. It's just content that's showing up for them.

Yeah. So they, they like it in the sense that it's saving them time. Their audience likes it. You know, it doesn't. Doesn't cost them a fortune to do. And the time savings that their editor and, and you know, writers, they can do other things than trying to keep up with what the heck's going on in, in the community.

So I don't really have to do anything except for moderate the free.

Free. And they do that. Like, you know, they pop into WordPress and, you know, a daily basis. Kick through them real quick. Yeah. You know, so not a big deal.

So save them.

Save them.

A lot of. A lot of time putting it together. I just turned off my ad blocker, so you can see that there are ads running on the site. So more. More traffic to the website, which means more ad impressions and then people subscribing via email to drive, to continue to drive more traffic to the site. SEO value finding, getting found in search, driving to the site, capturing the email list. So building your email list. Another benefit soon to come, paid feature events. Did I miss anything? That's pretty good.

Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah.

Cool. All right, well, this interview is over.

I'm out of here.

That's awesome. All right, cool. Thank you, Tyler.

Yep. Yep. Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com See you next time.