News and Updates

The success of our publishers is the most important thing for us at Slickstream. When they're happy, we're happy, and that's the principle that drives all of our decisions on the Engagement Suite (and everything we do).

But to understand how we can improve, it's important we understand exactly the impact we're currently having. To that end, we periodically do voluntary A/B testing with certain high-traffic sites, which allows us to isolate our net effect over time (see our Case Study with Pinch of Yum).

Most recently, Dr. Urvashi Pitre from TwoSleevers.com was kind enough to share the results from her recent Slickstream test. The findings are really exciting, and we'll dive in below!

How is it February already?

January just flew right on by here at Slickstream, with well over 100 new websites signing up for our Engagement Suite and a whole heap of new records broken. One of those records was for total favorites (over 5,000,000 in a single month!), and to celebrate we decided to take a closer look at the content that visitors loved so much.

So without further ado, here are some of our 'favorite' things from January:

What a year.

Slickstream started 2019 as a fledgling startup serving a handful of food blogs, and closed it with our biggest month ever: 100,000,000 pageviews in December alone.

Slickstream CEO Kingston Duffie was featured on Tuesday by our friends at Food Blogger Pro in their weekly podcast.

In a wide ranging interview with Bjork Ostrom, Kingston discusses the importance of on-site engagement, the lessons he's learned from his past companies, and why he's so excited about Slickstream.

You can listen to the whole thing here, but we also want to share some of our favorite excerpts:

November was a record month here at Slickstream, and we wanted to share a few major milestones we hit along the way.

While the Slickstream Engagement Suite works on just about any site, there's one group of publishers that have taken to us faster than the rest: food bloggers.

Here at Slickstream, we offer you a lot of options to increase your on-site engagement. Our search, discovery, and engagement tools are designed to blend seamlessly with your website, and to help users intuitively find more of your content. But how can you tell if they're working?

That's where our analytics come in. Up until this point, these analytics have been kept in beta while we identified what was useful, what wasn't, and how best to display everything. As of today, we're excited to announce that they're ready for a full release!

Here's what's new:

One of the key components of Slickstream's Engagement Suite is its Heartbeat/Favorites tool, which you may recognize as the heart icon that sits above search in the bottom right corner of Slickstream-enabled websites.

It's one of our most-used tools (particularly on mobile) and it serves two valuable purposes for publishers:

• First, it enables visitors to effortlessly express their appreciation on posts, and engages them with live animations as visitors from around the world do the same.
• Second, it provides those visitors with an easy method to save content and refer back to it later on a personal 'Favorites' page, without having to log in or enter an email address.

Today we've made an update which we think improve both its look and feel and its overall functionality. Users can now access their favorites from the Heartbeat module itself, via a simple and intuitive bookmark icon that appears after clicking.

Here at Slickstream, we have two top priorities that guide everything we do:

1. Creating a better user experience for your website's visitors
2. Increasing the actual engagement on your site

The first point is easy to see, and our feedback from happy customers speaks for itself. But measuring increased engagement is a little trickier, which is why we were so happy when our friends at Pinch of Yum volunteered to open up their site for some thorough testing.

Well the results are in, and we're absolutely thrilled. We'll dive into the details below, but here's the short version: in one week of analysis, our Engagement Suite increased total clicks 17.6%, led to 489 additional hours of on-site activity, and raised pageviews and revenue 2.2%!

Let's dive into the details below.

If there's one question we get all the time from our customers, it's "How is Slickstream going to affect my site speed?"

Frankly, it's an excellent question. I don't have to tell you how important site speed is to publishers — it has a huge impact on both advertising revenue and visitor satisfaction.

So we decided to dive into the numbers on what actually happens when you add the Slickstream Engagement Suite to your website. I'll get to that below, but first it's important to explain how we work and what the most important metrics to focus on are.