This release sees the general rollout of Newspack Insights, our new reporting dashboard! Plus: we’re surfacing Campaigns segments in GA4 and making fonts from the Newspack classic theme available in the Block Editor!
Newspack Insights (#724)
We’re making Newspack Insights available to all hosted Newspack publishers. Newspack Insights is a reporting dashboard built directly into your WordPress admin. It answers the questions newsrooms actually ask — how big is my audience, are readers engaging, where are conversions coming from, are my paywalls and campaigns working, how healthy is my subscriber and donor base, how are my ads performing — in one place, in newsroom language rather than analytics language.
Measure segment reach in Google Analytics (#800)
There has been no way to tell how many readers a Campaigns segment matches. Reach only became visible once prompts targeted the segment, so a promising segment and an empty one looked the same up front. Segments now report to Google Analytics, so the size of every segment, targeted or not, is a plain GA4 report.
What’s new
- Each segment a reader matches sends an np_segment_matched event to GA4, once per GA session, the first time the reader matches it. A new Matched Segment custom dimension carries the segment.
- The dimension sets itself up on sites with Site Kit connected to GA4. Sites set up before this change pick it up on their next wp-admin visit, no action needed.
- Reach per segment becomes a plain report: dimension Matched Segment, metric Total users, every segment ranked, and it can be split by known and unknown readers.
- A segment assigned to no prompt still reports, so it can prove itself before anything targets it.
- A second event, np_segment_won, records the reader’s highest-priority segment: the one whose prompts become eligible. A matched count far above the won count flags a segment shadowed by higher-priority ones.
- Reporting also covers gated articles and posts with prompts turned off, both of which prompt display skips.
- Only real readers count. Preview and editor traffic reports nothing, and a segment relying on a check the site can’t run (for example, a memberships segment while the memberships plugin is inactive) is withheld rather than counted as matching everyone. Readers matching no segment report as “none”.
- Because Analytics reports show segment IDs, the segment editor now shows each segment’s ID.
Header and Body fonts in the editor (#842)
The Newspack classic theme now offers its two site fonts, Header and Body, directly in the block editor. Setting a paragraph in the headline font previously meant custom CSS. It is now a dropdown.
What’s new
Any block with typography settings, such as paragraphs, headings, buttons and the like, can now use the site’s Header or Body font. The choice is saved with the post and carries through to the published page. The two choices are not fixed font names. They point at whatever the site’s fonts are currently set to in the Customizer, so changing a font there updates every block already using it, with no need to reopen or re-save those posts. Each child theme ships its own Header and Body fonts, and the dropdown follows whichever variation the site is using.
Hotfixes
- [FIX] Resolve click proxy redirect target consistently (#808)
- [FIX] Stop sending Newspack receipt and welcome emails for every order on sites with no donation products (#589)
- [FIX] Show “Visa ending in 4242” or “Credit / Debit Card” in the *PAYMENT_METHOD* merge tag instead of “Card – stripe” (#589)
- [FIX] Send each order’s receipt or welcome email only once, even if the order returns to completed (#589)
- [FIX] Empty Broadstreet ad slots no longer appear as colored strips — most visibly as a gap in the footer. This affected sites using Broadstreet with Appearance > Customize > Colors > Ad background set to Custom (#578)
- [FIX] Republication Tracker Tool: Ignore views with an invalid post ID; add bot and repeat-view filtering, off by default (#593)
- [FIX] Enable legacy subscription product types (#819)
- [FIX] Event Dates block: show event times in the site’s timezone whatever timezone the editor works in (#863)
Other changes
- [FIX] Newsletters tracking pixel: prevent mismatched tracking ID for discarding whole processing batch (#906)
- [FIX] Fixes the display of the number of newsletters lists setting that should be displayed in the post-checkout modal, in the Audience Settings page (#849)
- [ENHANCEMENT] Carousel block: add tag labels, with consistent label treatment across every context that renders post labels (#429)
- [FIX] Homepage Posts / Carousel: restore ‘load more’ for Sponsors-only blocks (#522)
- [FIX] Suppress payment notices for subscribers holding an equivalent active membership (#376)
- [FIX] New workflow created for regenerating translation automatically (#843, #848, #847, #845)