Video: Launched: the newest product solutions from WordPress VIP [Webinar] | Duration: 3616s | Summary: Launched: the newest product solutions from WordPress VIP [Webinar]

Transcript for "Launched: the newest product solutions from WordPress VIP [Webinar]": Hello, everyone. Welcome. Hi, all. What an exciting day for us. We are so pumped about the opportunity to share a little bit about, of what we've been working on. My name is James Giroux. I'll be your your host, your navigator through through all of this. And I'm joined by Anne-Marie Goulet, our CMO, and Brian Alvey, our CTO, who have been working behind the scenes with me to get this all set up for you along with an incredible staff team. And we are very, very excited, to share all of this stuff with you today. So what stuff were we talking about? Let's jump right into the agenda. Today, we're gonna be, talking a lot about some of the key features that we've released over the last couple of months. We're gonna be having a discussion about the real world impact of these solutions. And then at the very end, we're gonna be doing a bit of q and a. So if you are here and you see the, chat and q and a tabs, the chat is where you can just banter, have fun, meet people. And the q and a tab is where you can ask us very specific questions that, hopefully, we'll be able to answer. Now we may not be able to answer all of your questions. And if that's the case and you've still got lots that you wanna talk about, there's a button at the top right of your screen, I believe, called meet with WordPress VIP. You can click that at any time to schedule some time with us. We'll be happy to do a demo with you, on any of these features, walk through this with your teams, or if you've just got questions you want us to answer, more than happy to answer those after the webinar is over. Well, are you ready? I'm ready. We know that, for content teams in particular, today what we're going through is this incredible change. Right? We're all facing these these pressures. We've got tighter budgets. We've got fragmented Martech stacks. This whole AI thing, is it noise? Is it real? We're still trying to figure all that out as you are. And then on top of all of that, there's rising security threats. But if there's one thing that we know, it's that while change is constant, what we really need is a platform that is designed to adapt alongside you. That's what we believe WordPress is, and that's what we're excited to show you a little bit of today. So So we're gonna be walking through some of our latest solutions, how they address some of those pressures and challenges, and really give you a little bit of a behind the scenes look at how we're helping teams build for what comes next with real, demonstrable gains in content, velocity, engagement, protection, and of course, learning. So before we jump into everything, I've got a question for you. We've got a little bit of a poll here. And this is the question. What's the biggest challenge your web strategy is facing right now? Is it ROI? Is it page engagement? AI adoption? Site security? Developer resources? Could be any of those. Very excited to hear your answers, and we'll be revealing the results toward the end of this webinar. Now without further ado, I'd love to turn it over to Brian Alvey, our CTO. He's gonna be jumping right into our demo to show us all of the good stuff that we've been working on. Over to you, Brian. Cool. Alright. I think you have to stop screen sharing so I can screen share. There you go. Go. Look at this. Alright. Let's see what we get here. Let's get some screens going. Let's try this. Alright. So we have a lot of stuff to show today. I think you should see a a title slide that says remote data blocks. That look that looks good. So we're gonna talk about, six quick things here. I'm gonna take you on a tour of this, and, Google is having me reload. Give me one second too. There we go. Good. Alright. So remote data blocks. I'll explain what remote data blocks is. I'll show it to you. That's better than explaining it. You know how sometimes your, your business runs more than one website? So let's say you have a store where you sell things online, a content site that drives people to your store with how to content or gift guides. The problem when you run those two sites is there's a disjointed experience for your audience. People who show up on a how to site don't see the shopping cart. Then they add things that are shopping cart in the store, but they don't see the gift guides anymore. The two sites don't talk to each other. So we we thought about that, and we said, what if you could keep your store running in Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud or BigCommerce? Any of those popular, commerce platforms, but still run all of this through the world's most popular and easy to use, CMS, WordPress. So that's what remote data blocks lets you do. It lets you bring data from other systems like commerce and other ones that I'll show you into WordPress. And so it looks like this. So this is just WordPress. You've all seen this before. There's a I've installed the remote data box plug in. I'll show you how to do that in a second. When you're in there, you can add data sources to WordPress. So there will always be data that you cannot just clone into your WordPress site. So maybe if you have 10 products, sure, you could build some custom post types. But if you have a thousand, a million variations of your sneakers and stuff, all the things that you wanna sell, it's just too much. So you wanna kinda hook that up live. Hooking up, the data sources is as easy as saying I wanna connect an Airtable, Google Sheets, Shopify. You can build your own. There are more connectors coming. Or any HTTP and any URL, any endpoint that returns data, you can hook all these up. And configuring them looks like this. I wanna go in and and pull in a sample Airtable, real estate database. It's one of their samples that they use, to show off their service. Or in Shopify, same thing. You it's as easy as just putting in your access token and giving it a name, and then you're good to go. And here's what this looks like for people who are, creating content. So instead of creating a gift guide where you're putting in stale pricing data or pricing data that goes stale immediately, we make this much easier. So let's call this webinar demo. We're gonna put in some some regular WordPress content. So I'm gonna just make a paragraph and I'll make another paragraph and another paragraph. In between those though, let's put in some live product data from Shopify. So So you add a Shopify block. That's all done through this remote data blocks plug in. You choose the product you would like to show. We happen to host the onion. People always, like, get a kick out of that versus TechCrunch, NASA, all these other things. People love the onion. So let's add, some Onion products. Let's sell some Onion gear. There's a an Onion logo hooded sweatshirt. So it just dropped in four blocks of live data from Shopify into WordPress where you're authoring. And like any WordPress content, I can go look at the outline, and I can say, okay. I've got the paragraph over there, another paragraph over here. What about this, Shopify product here? How do I can I move this stuff around like I can move around other WordPress content? Well, of course. So let's take the title and let's pull it out, put it above all of that. Let's take the price and stick it over on the right, and then let's go to that price. And let's go ahead and turn on the label and just say, here's what that thing is. So now you know the item price, $35, that's live from Shopify. If you go and change that in Shopify, it will change that inside WordPress. So now I'm done. I love this. This looks really good. I'm gonna go and write this great story about, how it's getting cold and, you need a sweatshirt, and I'll be able to sell sweatshirts from this page. So I'll save a draft, and then we can just go preview it. So what does this look like on, tablet? Well, it looks like this. It stacks really well. It does the it does what you would expect it to do in WordPress VIP. And if I look at it on mobile, same thing. I get this really nice tall content where it stacks all this stuff. But if I'm on desktop, I get two columns of, sweatshirt content. So pretty pretty impressive, how you can pull in data like that, and that's just a commerce example. So let me see what I can show you next. All of this is managed, like I showed you, in WordPress VIP, but we also let you manage that in our hosting dashboard. So at WordPress VIP VIP, we have sort of an industrial strength hosting dashboard where you can go in and plug in integrations with our new integration center. So what does that look like? Looks like this. You go into our hosting dashboard. You have all these integrations you can choose from. I showed you an Airtable one. There's nice landing pages showing you how you can hook these things up. We also, like I said, have Google Sheets, Shopify. You can also, let me see. Remote Datablocks itself is an integration. There's this toll bit, AI bot stopping integration, that's in I think it's in beta. Maybe it's live. And then, oh, look at this real time collaboration, Google Docs style, multiple editors in the same post at the same time. Kind of groundbreaking. That's just that's coming. You didn't see that. But live collaboration is coming soon. Alright. So when you wanna go turn these on for one of your customers, you can go take turn them on, then it's then it's the same thing. You go configure them the same way that I showed you before, and that was it. How can you learn more about remote data blocks? One, there's gonna be a talk about it at the, WordCamp US in Portland soon. We'll give you the dates at the end of the show. The other is it's open source. So you can go into the plugins directory today, search for remote data blocks, and you can go download it and install it in WordPress, and it shows you how everything works. And if you want even more information on, this, this is the remote data blocks in the, the the the plugins directory. If you want even more information, there is simply remotedatablocks.com. And if you go there, it will show you everything, and you can go and, like, show me how to hook up, you know, whatever these, how you extend this, how you do local development and stuff. So, pretty impressive stuff. That was, remote data blocks. So so Brian, just a quick question. I know my marketing team is super pumped about RDB, what I'm calling it for short. Help us to sort of understand what makes this unique from, marketing lens as well as for a journalist. I'm curious because I get a lot of questions. Like, oh, how do I use this? How do I feed this into my workflow to drive leads, to drive, you know, eyeballs on my pages? Yeah. Help us combine that. Yeah. It's a good question. I did show you a commerce example. You're right. That was kind of where it started with how to blend these experiences that are very disjointed as you hop from, you know, five different URLs that have four different designs and headers and stuff, and your shopping cart goes empty and then it's full again. But you're right. So more than half of our customers are giant media companies, massive publishers, people who just make content. They're not selling something. Content is the product. For those people, your remote data blocks, the kinds of outside outside large datasets that you'd want to pull into your content, but you can't just copy it all in there, would be things like, stock market symbols and stuff and related information for financial data. Or even better, people will pull people will make a Google Sheet or an air table for, like, gamer content for maps for a new video game or, election data. So how do I pull in election data, let my authors, work with that in the content and have it be live, have it not be stale, have it change in real time. Not just put, like, a an election ticker on the front end of the website, kinda like the how you load ads, and the site has no idea what ads it's showing. It has no idea what election data is in there. This actually makes it a native part of the editorial experience. The data and the editorial are sort of seamless. And And then you you asked a really good one, which is marketing. So I look at these in terms of three kinds of sites you have built, media sites, which is your publishers, the commerce ones that I showed. Marketing is an interesting one because you, Anne-Marie, as a as a as a chief marketing officer have, a bunch of things you want to bring in, HubSpot forms and, customer conversion journeys and things like that. What are some things in your world that you'd want to be able to plug into, like the WordPress VIP website from marketing point of view? The things like for me, it's like how do we cross promote other content, you know, for running a webinar, for running an ebook, or, anything, an event, you can cross promote it contextually within the website. So the more contextually relevant it is for a marketer across their journey, that's that's what we're looking at. So it's not just this generic. You have to set sort of like this. The content goes on this page, but but these rules, at least with more data blocks, you can get a bit more customized and personalized. That's the objective. Got it. So so the examples that I would use for talking to a a a chief marketing not, you know, not just my favorite chief chief marketing officer, but any chief marketing officer would be, that you're talking about, you mentioned a few things. Let's say you have an events database. If you have an events database in an Airtable or if your company won't pay for Airtable using a Google Sheet, and so you have a list of your upcoming events in there, you can flag ones in there as active. You can pull that live list of events, a live job board, all kinds of things into your content, and it's never stale. You know, if something changes in the spreadsheet, it's gonna break the cache and change it in your website as well, and then showing related content as well. But I think it's those those interesting little, like, one off databases that that you don't wanna build a whole new thing in your CMS for. How do I just pull in a Google Sheet, some kind of thing with a list of events or a list of upcoming something or my my my marketing branding information. Right? Those kinds of things. So there's there's plenty of stuff. And that's that's the first part of it. I did the data part. The second part actually is the full on personalization. So how do I use it? I'll look at the CDP like BlueConic or Salesforce to tell me something about the people who are on my site right now so I can show them something personalized. That's exactly where this all leads. It's from the editorial side to the front end, composing these things, solve the problems that you're talking about. So it's a good question. I'm going to there we go. Let's go to Parsley headline testing. So the second thing I'm gonna show you, it's very interesting because, I looked at each of these six things and I said, well, why does this exist? And this one, I will tell you exists because it is just the most requested thing that that everybody's asked for. I know I showed the real time thing in a sec, but but this this is really big. People said, how come we can't test headlines in Parsley? So we added a way, to do that. I'm gonna show you, right here. So so this is a bunch of headline experiments running. They will show you things like how many views they got. Fundamentally headline, testing, if you haven't used it or you're not one of those people who is kind of clamoring for it. When somebody publishes a story, you just get one headline, and you put that everywhere, all over your site, you share that on social, that goes out into search engine pages. What if you can make a better headline that was more likely to be clicked? So we let you run experiments with alternate headlines that are served to an audience. So let's say a 100,000 people come to your website and you're showing five different variations of your headline, 20,000 people will each see a or b or c or d or e out of all these things. And then we will show you stats on which ones were more clicked, And it's really interesting. It's just a game. It's it's really totally fascinating. And you'll see actually here, I don't know if you can see, on the right here, the right two in the middle, they ran a headline test on, like, what happened to me at Buffalo Wild Wings was wrong. And they ran it for 16,000 impressions. And they they found out that variant b was good. It beat the other variants. Then they made that the headline, and then they went and ran it again to see if I could get a better variant out of that. So here's what these look like when you click into them. So this is my Buffalo Wild Wings story, and it shows that these are all the variants. So the original was I went into the women's bathroom, the server banged on my stall. That sounds terrible. But here, I was harassed at Buffalo Wild Wings. Anyway, this is now turning into a bashing Buffalo Wild Wings, webinar. Let's not do that. So what we show you is that this one here performed better than these, and it will show you kind of a range of statistical significance. So some of them are insufficient to say this is the best ever, but this one, we have enough data to say, you should change it to this one. This one's gonna win. And down at the bottom, you can see over time how the clicks go. That purple one is winning or this or how many impressions they were getting. Let me show you one more here. Oops. This actually wasn't sharing that tab. This is fun. This is the story I was talking about. If I ever am not I'm talking about something and not seeing it, just scream at me. But these are the different headline variations, and this shows you the strength of how that one did versus the others. And down here, it actually shows you the stats over time. So the purple one was clearly the winner, getting the most clicks. I'll show you another one here. This is a political one, and the same deal. You'll see it's clear this one up top is winning. We give all of them a certain amount of impressions at the beginning to see which one is gonna win, and we always give impressions even to the ones that aren't performing. But over time, what we're trying to optimize for here is getting you the most clicks. So if we see two or three out of your six headlines are a dud and they're not getting clicks, we stop showing them so much, but we still show them just enough to see if maybe they're good. And that gray in the background there is kind of the average over time of all these. So that was, How long is that period of time? Like, how long are you waiting for a result to come back? You know, when you make a new one, I think it defaults to, like, forty minutes, but it it just depends on the company. So it depends on the customer. If you have, millions of visitors a day, you can learn a lot in fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour. If you are, maybe an important site but not with a lot of traffic, you might test your evergreen headlines, and you might wanna run those experiments for two days, four days, and just give it enough you you need to run it long enough to get enough audience to be able to say, I have confidence that that this wasn't just an aberration, that this headline is statistically better than the others. Then what you do from that, you take that good headline, you go back to your CMS, and you paste that one in. Now you share it on social again. Now you share it, you make sure your your, Google comes and crawls it again because those will be more likely to be clicked. So it helps you not just win on your own site for recirculation, but also win out in the world against all the other sites. Mhmm. So So there's a really interesting question Brian's brought up, in the chat just asking about the impact of this on SEO. So can you talk a little bit about maybe just the mechanics of how headline testing works? Because I don't think we're actually replacing the URL or the slug or how that works. We're just sort of presenting it. Totally. So while the experiment is running, we are actually intercepting the page. And before the page renders and before the content is seen, we are faking that and we're showing, like I said, five different headlines to to one bit of our audience. And then over time, we're rebuketing, that audience. But Google only still sees the original headline. Search only sees the original headline. Once that forty minutes is up or that four hours or whatever your window is where you wanna be doing the experiment, if you get a headline that is statistically better, you go plug that back in and you resubmit it to Google. So the benefits you get in terms of SEO, if you have a high traffic website, a news site, breaking news, you know, your your you know, we host your post rolling stone, things like that that have millions and millions of page views, you know, all day long. They will quickly know which ones are good and then be able to resubmit them. Somebody else, it would take a little longer to figure out which one form performs better. And then there are some AI enhancements to this. So, like, for instance, the first version of this that we put out said go in, choose one of your headlines. Oh, there's also it's like there's no configuration to this too. You just go into Parsley, choose one of your headlines that's there. We've already seen your stories. It's already live. You put in alternates, and all you had to do was add a line of JavaScript to your site. You don't have to change your markup. You don't have to redo anything. This just seamlessly works and replaces that headline. If that headline shows up in three places on your homepage and in sidebars and in related links, it changes it everywhere. And once I've seen variation b, variant b, I'm always gonna see variant b for the length of that experiment. So I'm never confused seeing different headlines. So it's done in a really high level. The amount of crap that went into this was crazy and these charts are beautiful. But once you've gotten enough information, then you go back. You update the story and you resubmit it to Google. And the idea is, let's say you have the fourth most clicked headline, you know, from your original title, once you get a better, more clickable title that you we've proven people want to click versus other, variations of it, if you submit that back to Google, hopefully, you should climb up to the three spot or the two spot, maybe number one. It's a good question. Alright. I talk fast, so if you have questions, jump in. But I'm gonna go to the next thing, which is content intelligence. So, what is partially content intelligence? Well, WordPress VIP acquired the parsley content analytics company about four or five years ago, and didn't kind of merge the two at all. You had your CMS, you had your analytics, and they were like, you know, they didn't mix. We changed all that. We have a content intelligence plugin that brings parsley data into WordPress. And so rather than, talking about it, I'll just show it to you. So in here, I can click on one of my stories. You all know word what WordPress looks like. And when I do this, I can go in and I can see over here, I'm gonna turn on the parsley content helper. And over here, I can see the performance of this story. How many views I got, visitors, what my traffic sources were. Once we have information about this story, this really cool story about this really not boring story about content security policy, CSP, which is very important this says, then we're able to do things like, one, we can tell you how they perform, but two, we can use our, Parsley content analytics data to do generative AI things. Like, this is a good headline, but, which is the headline, right over here, your guide to content security policy. But let's make one that's provocative and, like a tech analyst would do. So you can just go generate new headlines to use and then you can pin in the ones you want, go through new searches, or even better, we don't have an excerpt for this. So oh, we do actually. It says learn how a content security policy protects your website from yada yada yada. We can generate new excerpts. That's all the generative AI stuff that we're doing, inside WordPress with the Parsley, content intelligence plug in. So, and if you like it, you can accept it and just plugs it in. So that's the beginning of the, generative AI stuff with Parsley content intelligence. And it really is just taking the Parsley traffic data and pulling it into WordPress so you can see how things are performing. But, also, we get to build on that. And so if you think of AI and generative AI, your your AI's ability to be amazing and do great work is constrained by how much data you feed it. So if you just feed AI your content data, if it only sees your WordPress CMS, then it will know how to write headlines in your voice, something that sounds like your brand. It will match kind of your brand and your voice. But once you also feed in traffic data, you can do things like say, oh, could you write me a headline for this story? Not just that sounds like something Rolling Stone or the White House or, you know, The Onion or whatever would say. The Onion writes their own headlines. No AI is writing this anytime anytime soon. But in any one of these, magazines, you can go and say, actually, could you write me a headline that sounds a lot more like the ones that have performed, you know, six times better than my other content? So taking not just the content data, but the content and the traffic performance data and feeding them to AI gives you better AI because AI wants data to feast on. So that was the third thing. Let's let's dive in all of that stuff from content intelligence, the parsley content intelligence plugin that brings parsley data into WordPress. It's kind of setting us up for these next level, AI recipes. And so the first one of those that I'm gonna show you is engagement boost. And when I say an AI recipe, what I mean is how can I use AI not just to write a headline? That's a simple act. To write an excerpt or give me a caption for this photo or tag this story because I don't feel like tagging it. Right? My my authors don't have enough time to tag things. Those are simple single actions. How do you do a multi step process like a recipe? This is one, engagement boost. So with a tool called, engagement boost, and this is one where we said, what if you used AI to do things that your editorial team doesn't have the time or the resources to do? And the first example we came up with was when a new story comes out, none of your other stories in your thousands or millions of pieces of content are linking to that story. Nothing is driving people to that. S e search engines are not seeing links to that new content. Nobody watching those old stories is clicking and going to that content. So what if you could go in and take a new story? So I'm gonna take this one here. This is one of the ones from our own website. So your roadmap to government accessibility compliance, 2026 and 2027 deadlines. I wanna go boost the engagement. What this means is, I'm gonna take this new piece of content that's only been out for a few days. We haven't linked to it from anywhere, and I wanna go find other content on my site that is either high traffic or has great SEO on the same terms as this. And I want to plant links into 10 old documents to drive people to this to get more engagement, to get more recirculation. So the first thing it does is it goes and it scans to find old, other documents that would be a great place to plant links. One of them is this interview that we did. There's this agency. You know, it takes a second to scroll. Here we go. It's an agency called where is she from? Equalize Digital. Equalize Digital. Exactly. Oh my god. They're so good. And so these people care so much about accessibility. They're like the kings of accessibility. So I'd like to plant, in this old story, this old article that we did with Chris Hines and Amber Hines and whoever else is in it, for this equalized digital. I wanna go plant links in a great accessibility article that has probably great SEO traffic, search engine traffic about the terms around accessibility. I want to plant links to my new hot new piece of content, the roadmap to government accessibility compliance. I'm gonna plant them in that. So we built an interface that takes this thing, which would take you, you know, two hours per post to go plant all these links, find the links that are in there, take out the ones that aren't performing, figure out which words to make a link. We built an interface that lets you fly through two hours of work in two minutes, and we made it as easy to use as DocuSign. So for this story, road map government accessibility, I've got this old document here. Very cool. I like the link, website accessibility. I think that's good. So I'll accept that. So now it just planted a link in there. Now it takes me to the next document in the list. How to prep for European accessibility. Well, I don't like the link that it shows. This one here is just the word accessibility. I think Google would like it if I put, better, better terms on there. So what's it what's a better thing in here than this? It's not zoomed in like that. So web accessibility. So accessibility, web accessibility. You know what? There are other let's do WCAG. I think that should be the one that we make our, it's not gonna let me just do that. Let's do let's just do web accessibility. Alright. Make I'll use that as a link instead. So now I planted a link, and I'll accept that one to web accessibility. And let's take one more in here. I'm gonna show you. Anyway, planning links is a lot of fun. So instead of this one, instead of the one that suggested WordPress VIP, I would go and find something about, you know, FedRAMP authorization or something like that, and I'd make that the link instead. And then done. So again, it's an interface for planting links in old content that lets you, drive recirculation on your site, lets you direct where your audience is going, that lets you direct where search engines are going. When they see these old great stories about accessibility, now Google is seeing links to your hot new piece of content, and your new piece of content is gonna rank better in, search engines. And I think that was it for the engagement boost. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit earlier, and, one of the things that I mentioned was this just this idea of, momentum. Right? When you've got viral moments or these articles that you're writing that are right in the zeitgeist, maybe you're you're breaking news, and you you have this opportunity to drive eyes, right, or to drive views to it. Something like engagement boost allows you to really fast track that or get that that momentum going toward an article that is of value. So I really love that. Engagement boost is something that has a ton of implications, not just for newsrooms, but also for marketers as well when we've got things that are happening that we really wanna see lots of views on. I don't know if any of you have ever had a campaign that you're like, gotta boost eyes on this. I gotta get views. Gotta increase conversions. Let's get more eyes on it. But, engagement boost, I think, is a great tool to do that. Totally. It's such a huge unlock for marketers. No. It's good. That's good. We looked at it and we said, you know, everybody's always planting links in new content that comes out to old content. And that's great for SEO hygiene. You should do that. But nobody's doing anything that sends traffic to your new stuff that you just paid to get published. You know, you have a marketing team doing that, and nobody has two hours to go take a piece of content and sit there and plant links. So, again, how do you make it a two minute process? It's almost fun. So that was that was the idea there. Nice. Alright. I think we have two more things left. A lot of parsley here. You know, when you buy a massive amazing content analytics platform that gives you this data that that's exclusive nobody else has, you get to build a lot of cool things on top of it. So one of them is, AI assist. So I'm gonna show you an example of that, which is in this Parsley this is the Parsley dashboard. The parsley dashboard is amazing. If you sit here and watch it, these stories kinda move in real time. It's like number seven story is gonna just move up to the, you know, sixth position and stuff like that. It's kinda mesmerizing. I kinda love it. But, the really cool thing about this is asking AI stuff. So, somebody recently wisely named this, parsley sage, which is, I think, really cool. And this is a whole new way to interact with your, analytics reports. So instead of find out. Let's see what this is. There is a tab. Alright. So instead of this, instead of just going through and looking at all your stuff, first off, it just jumps in and says your traffic peaked. This may be viewed between five and 6AM. Your engagement was the highest between, this time, but I'd like to ask it a question. You can ask it one of the sample questions, or you can just say, like, who was our top writer last month? And, it's pretty clever. It understands the site, so you don't have to understand it. So the whole point of Parsley is democratizing access to analytics data. You don't need a data science degree to go figure out which of your stories are working. I'm a reporter, not a data scientist. Just tell me what's working. Well, now you don't even need to understand our product. You can just go ask questions. So this says that our, so first off, I said, who was our top writer last month? Sage understood last month meant July 2025. That's good. I hope we got you we got that right. And then it says it was Claire Carr, and you can click to see more in authors. So it actually navigates you to the author's page by month to show you the the the report. And sure enough, there's Claire Carr and all these other people in this site, and you see that was the top person with 251,000. It's exactly what it says here. So it's good. I really like it when you ask it something and it gives you, the correct answer and, you know, makes me very happy. So you can ask it another question and, again, saying something like, what were our five top posts last Christmas? If you don't have to tell it what Christmas is, you don't have to tell it, what last Christmas is, and it will go through and it will just show you, once it loads here. Again, live demo. Very exciting. It hasn't loaded the data yet behind these things, but at some point, it will. Let's close it and try it again. Let's do this. What are our five posts? Top five posts last Christmas. There we go. So now it's analyzing all that, and it should come back with the stories and it should tell you that it understands what date that you were talking about. While it's doing that, I'm gonna jump to another screen and tell you that we have a post on our blog here, the top five prompts that editors are using with parsley sage. And it just came out, oh, three days ago by Andrew Butler. Look at that. So you can say things like, why is my traffic spiking today? Based on my top performing articles today, can you find three story ideas that will help me grow engagement? You can also say which traffic topics drove the most subscriptions last week. We don't have subscriptions, but maybe you do. That's very important. The lifeblood of your business. Right? Get your audio paid. And then there's, you can you can come up with a golden metric. You can actually you can write a book to parse this age here, and you can say, look, our golden metric, the one that our newsroom, not unlike the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, whatever. Our golden metric is these this combination of of data points. And when we see this growing, like, we're happy, like, page views, times the average engaged time, times return visitors, times conversions. And if you define that golden metric, you can then go ask Parsley to go back and tell me which pieces of content are best for my golden metric for my business and which ones are the worst, and then which authors have grown or dropped the most, month over month. I don't run that report live in a demo because it's kinda mean. It's like, which of our authors should we fire and which should we pay more? And, you know, times are tough for media companies. I'm not gonna do that to them. So that was a live demo of our, AI assist. And, again, basically, it's a sidebar where you don't have to think, you just ask questions, or it just finds things and tells you. So very exciting. I really find that feature Parsley to be incredibly compelling because I'm not a data scientist, so I don't often know the right questions to ask or the right data source to look at. When I go to GA and I'm looking at especially GA four, which has completely rewritten everything that I used to find easy about, Google Analytics. Now it's like, okay. Well, where's the report that I need to find the answer to the question that I'm being asked? Or, I think in marketing, there's always somebody maybe higher above who asks this question that they need data and a response to or a metric for, and you don't know what that that metric is, Sage is a great spot to go to at least get a starting point of where to look for a possible answer to the question. Not saying that CMOs ask for random data points, Anne-Marie, at all. I promise. What I love is, well, thank you. Yeah. It's it's it's the same thing, like, with from my lens, I don't I I don't wanna hire the best data analysts into marketing. I wanna hire the best marketers into marketing. And so this enables them to just cut to the chase, ask the question, they learn to they learn how to prompt, they learn how to ask the right question, and they can get back to just producing great content. And so it just takes away the fear and anxiety and also just build that confidence so they can get back to the craft, which is ultimately what I'm looking for is craft. Getting back to the craft equals getting back to driving pipeline. Yeah. Straight to, like, what are what does my business need? Right? I don't I don't need to hire data scientists. I need to market. Right? I need to get customers. This is the, what were our top top five posts last Christmas that I asked it. It came up with five. Is it the last from Christmas day? Again, it understood what Christmas meant. And it shows us all the stories and actually has nice read it here links that'll take you to the story. It actually takes you to the live story on the on the website, but also you can say see more in posts, and it will take you to this day right here. It is zeroed in on here's your Christmas day stuff, and it actually selected the day. So you don't have to know how to go find historical, go by day, scroll back to December, click on the twenty fifth. It just takes you straight there. I used to call it, like, a department store greeter. You just show up at the front and say, where's the toothpaste? And it just grabs you by the hand and says, let me show you. It's an Aisle 18, but I'll take you there. That's Sage. Pretty impressive. Alrighty. So let's go to I think that there's one more thing left here, and then we have plenty of more to discuss in q and a. So WordPress VIP security controls. Security is, I think it's the world's most boring topic. It's the last thing we always show in demos. It's something nobody cares about until you know, it's not even top 20 on their radar until it's number one when the site gets defaced, when, the site gets hacked and the ransomware stuff. We've had customers come to us that were offline for weeks or months because of other you know, where they hosted in the past and just the how proactive, people weren't for them. So we're very proactive, and so I'll show you a few things here. In our, dashboard for developers where you deploy all your sites, there's a whole section on security controls. You can add basic auth to your site. You can add, IP address, blocking and allowing and things like that. You can block bots by user agent and stuff like that. Or, we took a lot of different security things that people need to do, and we put them all into one place into a WordPress security control screen. And what we figured was, you know, we spend a lot of time on compliance. We spend a lot of time getting certified. We spent years going from FedRAMP, YSAS to FedRAMP moderate, the middle layer of, you know, really the only one you need of, FedRAMP for so we can do things like host the White House and host NASA and host federal government sites. We did all of that work, and then it kind of tells us when we just make security suggestions, recommendations, and people follow them, like enforcing two factor authentication or expiring users. When somebody goes away for thirty days, have them reactivate before they get to start writing on, you know, some of the world's biggest websites, world's biggest newspapers. So we put all that in one place to make it very easy. So you can go look at how many plug in vulnerabilities you have. That's a nice we have zero on this website, what WordPress version you're on, things like that. But also, do you have any inactive users that we need to go and kick out? That's one of the things that we do. There's another really cool thing that I'd like to show you, which is we have an automatic defensive mode that runs in our network. So WordPress VIP has a built in CDN. It's not like you don't have to go out and buy another CDN unless you need really specialized features that, you know, only that CDN has. Every site at WordPress VIP is running on the same global network that runs WordPress.com, which is hundreds of millions of sites, Tumblr, also hundreds of millions of sites. And so WordPress VIP customers are in that same network. And we have this really cool thing, which is if you're under attack, like cyber attack, we are able to send a challenge to the browsers that are coming in. And bots can't do these challenges. Bots aren't real, so they won't do what's called proof of work, which is like a math equation in the browser. So if I show you, it looks like this. I'm gonna clear this one. This is also a hard thing to demo because, basically, your site has to be at, like, the 95, 99% threshold for this to kick in. We made a site where it just kicks in for everybody. So what happens is, if somebody comes to your site, it goes checking your browser. This will only take a few seconds. You have seen this when you went to buy tickets on Ticketmaster or different kinds of things like that. These challenges are out there from CloudFlare and other CDNs. And once your browser passes, you get a cookie and you're in. No longer do you have to worry about the fact that a cyber attack is taking down the website and the article that you're here to read. You're in. Everything's good. Bots are blocked. So we do a lot of things there that I would say are built into our platform, and help you. And then the other way that I like to describe this, and I think I'm done sharing, is, we talk a lot about the fact that we host, you know, the White House. The if you ever stayed at a hotel and, like, the president was also staying there, the secret security is not there to protect you, but that's probably the safest hotel you're ever gonna stay at. And if you bring your magazine, your website, your store to VIP, you're basically living in the same gated secure gated community that the White House and NASA and all these government sites are living in. So you're not under cyber attack all day long yourself, but you're getting the benefit of all that protection. And it's funny because it's just one of the things on the proudest stuff that we do is this high level of security, and it goes all the way to our training. Everybody on this call has, like, stuff installed on their laptop. They have to go through the Kevin Mitnick videos. There people are trying to fish. We're trying we're hiring people to try to hack our our teammates all day long to get them to reveal something, and I constantly watch, like, red what do we call it? Red red test red flag test, something like that. People are passing those. And so we have the little reports about, like, past another one. So and so it wasn't fooled. I love that. So there's security for you. It's, it is really interesting. The security pieces is particularly, I think, of concern for organizations, especially ones that are regulated. AI is changing all of that too. Is is how is, WordPress VIP preparing enterprises for this new age of AI threats? Oh, so those those kinds of threats. It's interesting. So I was I think, you know, AI is a huge question, and and we're doing a 100 we're in a 100 different directions on AI, and we're doing we're doing a lot. But specifically on security, I I don't know that we have to I think you do have to worry. Okay? So when I think of AI right now, I think it's, like, 80% threat to our customers' businesses and 20% opportunity. And the opportunity only works if you move fast and take advantage of it. If you don't, then AI is a threat. Another place where it's a threat, like you said, is is insecurity, which is that somebody can fake, you know, a voice mail from my boss and say, oh, can you please go reset my password or send it to my personal address because I'm on the road and whatever. Those kinds of social engineering hacks to me, are now a 100 times better because of AI. So they are stepping it up, which just means you need a platform that is, like, a 100 times ahead of that and trying really hard to make sure. I think the things that we're doing though aren't so much to stop AI, like brute force, you know, password cracking or things like it's not about that so much as probably more people at our customers are being fooled. So therefore, we have to be more vigilant and we do expire their logins when they go on vacation and they come back or or a better one actually is, so I would say we we're you have to worry about better attacks because of AI, better better social engineering attacks. That's one. Another though is how can you use AI to spot patterns of activity? So let's say Anne-Marie has a massive marketing team and they're writing content all day long, but she herself only posts something maybe once every couple months. If she all of a sudden comes into the CNS and starts changing all the headlines of other people's stories and putting in bad words, like, you can either catch that after 30 of them have been done and somebody, you know, messages you in Slack because they saw it, Or how can AI say, you know what? That's not her normal pattern of activity. I think maybe she left her laptop alone at Starbucks for a minute, and somebody's going crazy, or maybe she's angry. I don't know. Right? There's something going on. How do you take that, spot that, and then stop that? So I think there's a couple ways that AI makes the attacks harder, but I think there are things that we can do on our side to use AI, in a stronger defensive mode. Sorry to say about your defacing our website. No. It's good. And, hopefully, you know, Anne-Marie and other CMOs aren't leaving their laptops open at Starbucks for other people to go in there, alter their headlines. How are we? We've got we we've we've talked through a lot of things now. I wanna switch over to some some discussion about it. But if you are curious, please don't forget, that you can set up a demo with us at any time. Click that meet with WordPress VIP button, set something up, or you can come and visit us next week at WordCamp US in Portland. We will be on-site. We will be demoing remote data blocks. So if you are around, and would like to get a demo, come find us. I'll be there hanging out. So love to meet you in person as well. Well, okay. So let's move into some some questions here. I'm conscious of time. We've got about fifteen minutes left, and there have been a number of things coming through on the chat. And the first one that came through relates to remote data blocks. So I wanna start there if that's okay. And it was you, Brian, had mentioned, you can literally add any URL to, like, a data endpoint in remote data blocks and pull in in data. And one comment came through as well. I would love it if we could pull from one WordPress site into another WordPress site. And I'm assuming that there is some way that that's possible. You you tell me. There is. Let me see. So, I'm gonna go back to I'm gonna show a thing in the settings. I think I'm gonna show a thing in the settings. Let me see. I don't know. I will. Okay. Good. So, so the answer to your question is that, like, yes, and it's also yes and yes. So three yeses. The first thing is that that point about being able to pull in from any URL, a lot of people, will put up, you know, the WikiLeaks kind of stuff, like sensitive political information, things like that. They will dump that in a GitHub repo. They they will open source a trove of data and they put it into a GitHub repo. So one of the ways that we designed this was how can you point to a URL like that that just returns any kind of data and then use that in what you're doing, where you're not hosting it, but you're pulling it into your site to show it. So that's one. The other is, let me get the let me share the screen here. I'm not sure which I think this will be the right the right tab. Honestly, there we go. Cool. So these data sources that you're seeing here, this one here that says Automattic remote, Datablocks trunk, our the remotedatablocks.com website that I showed you is actually powered using remote Datablocks. So it's pulling in, content from, I think, from a repo to build the site. And then the last part of the question was, can you use it to pull from WordPress to WordPress? And 100%, yes. That's the whole point. If you can expose one WordPress website through an API, you can use this for syndication. You can use this for other kinds of things like that. So, I've always thought of and and that I I forget who suggested it first. Somebody smart on the team did this. So, like, oh, what if you could, you know, take I'm I'm sorry. What if you could take your WordPress website, do this? And then our own, directory I showed you. Let me show you this. So this integration center right here, where we're showing you all the kinds of things you can do, like real time collaboration is coming in Shopify, and then the the landing pages for these. So here's the one for Airtable. All this data that you see in this dashboard is coming from a WordPress website. We built a WordPress website to store the directory of, integrations in our integration center, and we're pulling those live into your developer dashboard, into our front end marketing website to show you all the possibilities before you're a customer. After you're a customer, you activate it all here. So there you go. It's a great question. Incredible. Anne-Marie, you know, we've gone through a lot of these different things, and, the technical stuff is incredible. What are you seeing about it that you think is gonna be really impactful for, marketers? Like like, what is what it how is this unlocking, marketers, moving forward? So I I think the my team hears me say this a lot, but I think we're in an age of rising mediocrity when it comes to marketing, and there's a race to the middle with the proliferation of AI. And so for me, what I'm consistently trying to drive is this return to the fundamentals of marketing. How do we get content marketers to understand how to create really insightful, useful, engaging content? How do we enable brand marketers to create really exceptional cut through campaigns? And to be quite frank, there's more reliance on the content team than ever before. You know, the the traditional b to b lines have been blurring over the past couple of years. And what we know to be true from the past ten, fifteen years is largely starting to be redefined in this new world order. And so for me, it's how do you return to the fundamentals? How do you create really great, insightful, useful, helpful, engaging marketing? And you don't do that by having really clunky tools. And so for me, I'm always getting back to and I said this earlier, how do I enable my content marketers my marketers to get back to the craft of marketing? I don't want them bumbling around in a in a tool stack. I don't want them having to sift through BI tools. I just wanna get them to, get the answer as fast as possible so they can move on to creating really awesome marketing. So for me, it's it's it's removing the toil. It's removing the noise because the marketer's job is really hard as it is in the newsroom. And the expectations are that ever you have to learn how to adapt and evolve with AI while also marketing about AI and then using AI. So how do we make it really, really dead easy for them to get back to the fundamentals and the craft of marketing? And you don't get that by, you know, dumping on them really clunky old school legacy technology. And so I look at remote data blocks and Sage as massive unlocks cutting to the chase and shipping awesome marketing faster than ever. So it's it's it's a gift. I'm just looking through some of our, cute questions that have come through, and I I think we've answered great questions. Yeah. Yeah. Most most of the ones on on remote data blocks, we've we've kind of sort of answered. But there's one really I can I can I can I can I can I can we will we get this list at the end where I can go respond to some of these? Because it says Ryan Tibby and, Jason Upton. There's a lot of things in there, but, like, it's an hour's worth of stuff. I would love to email them. Can I do that? I think so. I think Ryan and Jason would love to hear from you. Okay. Yeah. No. That's fine. A lot of a lot of the questions are very tactical around, like, implementation of, you know, parsley headline testing and and, different things like that, which is really great. If you all have other questions that you want to, ask, please do. We would love, to hear those. Maybe right now is a good time for us to end the poll and see what the results look like. So I'm gonna ask my colleagues to end that poll. And so what's the biggest challenge your web strategy is facing right now? Well, the votes are in, and I think the, the number one response was, page engagement. So let's talk a little bit about page engagement. Anne Marie, why do you think that one was the top choice? My so I think I I think I will also put that one in. But, I think it's getting people to your site, and I think it's having to being able to, get past, you know, the, Google Discover or the AI summaries or social. And so how are you really creating content that it's like a it's like a, a break. How do you get people drawn to your website to engage in more content and get them to really feel that trust and that affinity for what you're publishing. It goes back to what I said earlier. How are you helpful? How are you insightful? How are you seeing some of those difference cut through? And so I'm not surprised. That's how I feel and I know that's probably how my own team feels and what we struggle with. And I I believe it's the same for newsrooms as well. So so Anne Marie talked about, like, getting back to fundamentals and and echoed that in her answer here, which is, you know, you're running a business. You have you have conversions. You wanna convert strangers into customers. Every one of our customers has a funnel, and they're they're trying to do this, these customer journeys. And, fundamentally, the best way to do that is with a direct relationship with your audience. And she listed, you know, the the AI bot summaries that just intercepted your audience. Right? Discover, all these things, all these places, social, all these things that intercept your audience, they're gatekeepers. They stand between you and a direct relationship with your audience. So we think very deeply here about what kinds of tools will help you get someone to your site and then keep them there so that you can do business so you can win. Because if our customers win, we win. Yeah. Because when you read those summaries, they lack soul, they lack your voice, they lack your tone. And I the there is that human connection that I think is still very much desired. And so, again, I go back to cut through all you being insightful and useful and helpful and interesting, and there is space for that. And I think right now, we're feeling the thrash and the and the and the burn of that. But this is something that we are trying to figure out as well, the brand is how do you develop a voice that no one else, has right now? Mhmm. How do you stand out from the noise? Right? Yeah. Exactly. I really loved your your statement about, you know, the almost like a race to mediocrity. And, you know, it's it's the voices at the extremes that seem to be resonating, and yet we don't always want to be at an extreme. So how do you find flavor in the midst of all of that? Brian, I think one of the things that excites me about all of this kind of stuff is I really see the enablement of editorial teams, of marketing teams, you know, publishers to be able to do more with without all of the complexities. How how are you seeing, you know, sort of the future of of where content platforms are going and, how we're positioning ourselves to respond to all of this change that's happening. I think of, like, you know, smaller budgets, fewer teammates. You know, there's there's lots more being asked of us. I'm just curious your thoughts on on that. So that's a an another that's an hour long question, an hour long answer. I appreciate that. That is a very big like, where where does this all go and how do we help them do more with less? I think we're in an interesting spot, like the enterprise WordPress VIP company, because, most of the the pro like like like, hosting providers, people that serve your websites, it's kind of like a, they have, like, teams of one that use them. So the people using a consumer SMB, a smaller platform, they are, they are the the the writer and the designer and the marketer and the developer and the owner. Like, they're the whole they're it's a it's a one person kind of shows up, uses one app. We're in a we play in a different space where our average customer not average, our average customers the numbers are off the chart because we have some very big customers. But our medium customer has, like, 40 people, that that work that are end users using our products. And in those 40 people, there are people using the developer tools for hosting. They do not go to WordPress VIP and write, you know, New York Post stories or, you know, onion stories. They wish they could. Then there's people who write and they don't code. Then there's marketers who don't do either of the first two things. So we have very specialized tools for them and so we have to think very carefully about what is that marketer trying to do. It's not a team of 10, it's a team of five. Right? Like I said, roughly 40 people across all of that, but some of them are hundreds and thousands. There are thousands of people using WordPress, per for some customers. And so how do you teach that one product to learn that job? So it's it's nice because there are things that developers do. And so when we look at adding AI to our products, it's like, how do we tell you what's going on? How do we tell you why it happened? But then how do we tell you what to do next? And our tools can only tell you what to do next if they understand deeply the pain points in the day, the life of a developer, and separately, pain points in the day, the life of a marketer or a content creator. So we spend a lot of time talking to people about what they hate and listening to their pain so we can turn that into something that makes their lives easier. So I I I don't I don't know if that ties directly back to your original question, but we have we have a lot of different places we have to do that. But in each case, like, what is your job you're trying to do, and how do we make it so, you do it better with us? Well, it's a great great answer, and I think Gabe echoes your sentiment there perfectly. He says, I will say that since adding our conversion events to Parsley, it's been much easier to visualize the user journey and what headlines are driving the best engagement and conversion rate. So right there is a response, that speaks exactly to what you're saying. We're making the lives of our customers and the teams that use our products easier to find and do the things they need to do. So And what Gabe yeah. Go ahead. I don't know what Gabe specifically said. Like, I just I wish I could hug Gabe. I don't know who Gabe is, but I would love to hug Gabe. Because, we have customers. When I got here a couple years ago, we have people paying for conversions, but they didn't hook them up. So like Gabe said, there are probably people using Parsley who aren't you're just scratching the surface. They're not getting that superpower, that benefit, that momentum out of the product. And if you just hook it up to your data, let it do its thing, it can be so good. So it's really nice to hear somebody talking about how this actually transforms their day and makes them super powered. There's a final question here that, Emily starts, to ask. She's she asked if there are any future plans to expand engagement boost, beyond just posts. Right? For example, to custom post types, which is a bit maybe more of a technical question or or, on that. But the thing I wanna ask about too is, like, headline testing. Because I think there's both of those are are set up for a lot of expansion and opportunity. So what are your thoughts on that? Oh my gosh. So so do headline testing first because, we understand that people now they wanna say, like, let's test buttons and conversions and and let's test photos and things like that. Parsley runs kind of, remotely from your website. It's a line of JavaScript on your site and it does its thing. It's very easy to do the headlines with that. It's a little harder to do the photos. So it's probably more one of those things where we will build it for if you're using WordPress and Parsley and we're hosting you, we can do the photo parts with our CDN. But if you're just so we have we have massive companies, so we do not host. We do not work. We don't even know what CMS they run on, and Parsley is able to do their headline testing, experiments. So so for now, it's headlines only, but we understand the road map for that. The other question though is this, it was engagement, booths, and posts. All of those are true. I don't know if it I don't know that it doesn't work on custom post types. So I'd have to look and see if it doesn't work. There you go, Emily. Maybe maybe your, your wish list is already cluttered. A lot of people. Awesome. Well, we've got just a minute left, and so, it's time for parting thoughts. So I wanna just give, Anne-Marie, you an opportunity to share your final thoughts on this and anything that stands out for you. I mean, I think it's just exciting to see how we can, create better experiences. Like, you know, I'm a CMO. I lead marketing teams, but I see a lot of parity with media and newsrooms. And for me, it's, you know, how do we get more consumer grade type experiences in the enterprise marketing team? And I think for, you know, journalists, it's like, when we talk to them, it's like, how do we enable them to get back to the craft of journalism? And so seeing a lot of this, great all of these great solutions rolled out, is just further validating that, okay, we are building for the future and we're for the present to be completely frank. And and we have a platform that's gonna evolve with us and and that's really key. So we can the world's changing and it's evolving and it's adapting and there's a lot of unknown, but, I think what we're doing is building a a hub that can can grow and evolve with that. Awesome. Well, I'm gonna have the final word here. Thank you both, Brian and Anne-Marie, for being here on on the webinar today. As always, if you are curious or would like to talk more, we would love to hear from you. Go ahead and click that meet with WordPress VIP button, and we will happily reach out. Thank you both. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thanks.