We know that many publishers use Google Analytics to understand their site's traffic. Perhaps that also includes Disqus Analytics for insights about your readers' engagement. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could capture Disqus commenting activity within Google Analytics?

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to start tracking total new Disqus comments in Google Analytics. Once configured, you’ll be able to measure the number of comments your readers are posting alongside the metrics you already track with Google Analytics such as page views and time on site.

Last month, we asked readers and commenters to tell us why they subscribe to email newsletters. With more publishers investing in growing their email lists, we wanted to hear from you on where you stand. Specifically, we wanted to know if you currently subscribed to any email newsletters and if so, why. Today, we’re sharing the results of that research and summarizing what we learned from the feedback you provided.

If you want to increase reader engagement, knowing how much engagement your content is generating is only half the story. You also need to understand who your audience is to make more informed decisions about your strategy and identify ways to better serve them.

In part one of this series on using Audience Analytics to turn your readers into loyal engagers, we shared strategies for getting readers to engage for the first time. Today, we’re going to talk about the different ways for keeping readers engaged and coming back.

You don't have to go very far on most publisher sites these days before you're asked to subscribe to an email newsletter. Maybe you've noticed this already while reading your favorite food blog or catching up on the top stories from a local news site. You can even find an example right here on the Disqus Blog. Just scroll to the end of any article and you'll see a prompt appear inviting you to subscribe to our newsletter (please do if you like 😃).

Developing effective strategies for increasing reader engagement shouldn’t feel like guesswork. If you don’t know who your most avid readers are, the impact of your engagement efforts, or understand how your community is growing over time, that ends today.

It’s here! 🎉 After months in beta testing, the Disqus for WordPress 3 plugin is now available to download in the WordPress Plugin repository.

Version 3.0 introduces several notable improvements including an overhaul to Commenting Syncing, a new Automatic Installation feature, and a redesigned plugin settings page. In addition, we completely rewrote the plugin to utilize the latest WordPress APIs so that we can deliver you more frequent updates and new features in the future.

Recently, we released a new Email Subscription feature to help publishers grow their email lists. Many of you requested a way to automatically import new subscribers into your email marketing provider. Today, we’re excited to announce an update to our Zapier integration to automate this task and help you get more done with Disqus.

Zapier allows you to easily create workflows to connect all your favorite apps (over 1,000 to be exact) to do just about anything. Best of all, Zapier requires zero technical knowledge to get up-and-running.

More than ever, we see publishers investing in building direct connections with their readers to cultivate stronger relationships. With the threat of Facebook’s pivot away from publishers, publishers are increasing their investment in on-site engagement, email newsletters, and subscriptions where they own the relationship with their readers.

To kick off the new year, Disqus hosted a hackathon recently where teams worked on various projects to explore new ideas, solve interesting problems, and build something cool. At the end of the week, teams demoed their projects to the company who voted for their favorites.

Here are four of the most interesting projects that came out of the hackathon. Let us know what you think in the comments below! If you missed the recap of our last HackWeek, visit this blog post here to learn more.