News and Updates

One of the best parts about subscribing to Slickstream is the wealth of data available in your analytics portal. It features content insights, clickthrough data, search queries, recommendation pairs, individual widget usage, and much more. To be honest, we know it can be a little overwhelming!

That's why I wanted to take some time today to outline some of the best ways our publishers use Slickstream insights to grow their sites, and to show off some of the information you may not have realized was there. Let's dive in:

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 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.)

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.

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.