The story of how a pizza order inspired our latest feature, Campaign Tracker.
If you ordered food online within the last 5 years, you probably experienced how transparent delivery tracking systems have become. Let’s say you’re ordering a pizza. Once your order is placed, you can see when it is being prepared, when it’s packed, when your driver has picked it up and follow it all the way to your front door. Not only do these tracking features make us more patient when we’re hungrily waiting for our order, it also gives us a behind the scenes peek into the number of people and steps required to make it happen. In a way, it makes us appreciate pizza more - if that’s even possible.
That’s exactly what went through the mind of one of our cofounders and VP of Account Management, Melanie Holohan Vernoia, one pizza-filled evening at the end of 2023. The idea was simple: like the process of tracking a pizza delivery, customers should have visibility into the creation and distribution of a story with Stacker. Until recently, our team of account managers (AMs) had to manually update our customers of the progress of their story, often via video calls or emails.
It created a lot of friction on both sides, with our customers being afraid to ask for too many updates, and our AMs having to do repetitive tasks to keep them in the know throughout the production of a campaign. What if instead, we created a system that kept our customers informed of the status of their story, from creation all the way to distribution and performance analysis? Melanie shared the idea with the product team, and project code name “Pizza Tracker” was on.
From Recipe to Delivery
After multiple conversations with customers, we validated our original hypothesis that they would benefit from more transparency and visibility on the campaign timing and progress. So we made "Pizza Tracker" a priority for the Q1 2024 product roadmap. By late January 2024, early mockups were in the hands of our designers and developers, with the goal of having a working prototype ready for the next major client meeting. We continued to gather feedback from customers over the next several months via early demos and discussions to make Campaign Tracker truly useful.
From day one, the goal was to create a tracking experience as smooth as the best food delivery apps. So we integrated the Campaign Tracker directly into the existing campaigns page in the customer portal, to make the user experience intuitive and frictionless.
The tracker displays each active campaign in a table format, just like the reports for completed work, maintaining consistency with the existing dashboard layout. Is the content distribution campaign still in the production phase? Has it moved into the review stage? Or are we ready for distribution? No more guessing games or playing phone tag: now customers have a real-time view built directly into the campaign dashboard.
By the end of Q1, we pre-released the campaign tracker to 20% of our customers as a test. And at the beginning of May 2024, Campaign Tracker officially rolled out for every user on our platform. Customers can now follow each campaign from creation to distribution without having to reach out to their account managers.
“I just got my first notification from the Stacker platform. I love these new alerts!”
Emily Lew, Benzinga
The final version of Campaign Tracker provides value for our clients in several ways:
“I LOVE IT! It's a good reminder to log into the portal.”
Nichole Dobo, The Hechinger Report
What’s Next?
Although delivering the first version of the Campaign Tracker was rewarding, we know the experience will continue to evolve as we collect more real-world usage data and client feedback. We’re already working on features that will help clients decide which stories to distribute, as well as new metrics that will prove the value of earned distribution. In the future, we hope to go beyond campaign status updates and add more automation to streamline every step of story production and distribution. Ultimately our vision is to create a seamless platform that empowers our customers to create and distribute engaging stories with unprecedented speed and scale.
But for now, the Campaign Tracker is live! If you're a brand craving a fresh and compelling way to distribute your editorial content at scale, be sure to place your order with us. You'll be able to track every delicious detail along the way.
Featured Image Credit: Stacker - Shutterstock
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