News and Updates

If there’s one thing that matters to us most here at Slickstream, it’s the visitor engagement data that drives everything we do. And while it’s all well and good to create shiny new objects for our publishers to put on their sites, in the end they have to actually drive clickthrough.

So when we roll out a new tool in the Engagement Suite, the first thing we do is test, test, test! And this week, our friends at DIY & Crafts were kind enough to let us publish the results on our latest addition: the content grid.

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!

Slickstream publishers sometimes ask me why we use "activity time" as one of our key engagement metrics. The answer is easy. It is directly correlated to revenue -- and everyone wants to know how they can increase revenue.

First, let me explain what I mean by "activity time". This is the active time that a viewer spends on your site. Don't confuse this with session duration. That is a metric that you'll see in Google Analytics. But for a variety of reasons, it is a very poor measure of engagement. (Just think about someone who opens one of your pages and then goes out to lunch while leaving that page open in their browser.)

People for a long time have talked about "bounces" when referring to website analytics. As experts in engagement, we believe that the way it has been commonly defined leads to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. So let's clear this up.  You'll see in a minute why this is relevant to your site revenue.

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:

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.