As Slickstream's marketing person, I never get tired of talking about on-site engagement and the data behind it. Honestly it's the best part of the job!
So you can imagine how thrilled I was to feature in the latest episode of the Chopped Podcast with Marly McMillen. She runs the Chopped Academy, which features a variety of resources for bloggers, and her own blog Namely Marly.
Slickstream is being updated starting today for some sites, rolling out to others within the next few days.
We're in the process of updating all sites with our latest release.
As usual, if you haven't already seen these changes, you should be seeing them sometime in the next few days as we roll them out to all sites.
The food blogging business has not been immune to the effects of Covid-19. We heard many of our customers tell us about how advertising rates had dropped. And we were well aware that traffic levels to these websites grew significantly during the crisis.
Because of our rather unique position, we were able to put numbers to these stories. Sure enough, traffic levels have almost doubled during the crisis, while advertising rates fell to about half of their usual levels, although rates have been recovering recently.
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!
We are releasing a minor update today to address a few important issues that have come to our attention.
We've been listening to ideas coming from our publishers. We're happy to announce a few more additions to our Engagement Suite.
We've just gone live with some improvements to Slickstream:
We know that page speed is essential to high engagement. We have always worked hard to make sure that when Slickstream is added to your site, we have the minimum possible impact on page load times and performance.
These are trying times for everyone, and the impacts of Covid-19 are being felt acutely in the publishing industry.
Many publishers are seeing increased traffic, but their ad revenue per pageview has decreased significantly. Since we charge on a pageview basis, we understand that this has made our service less affordable. As such, we've decided to make a temporary adjustment to our pricing:
For the next three months, we will be lowering our prices by 50%.
