Cultivating an Engaged Food Blog Audience

[00:00:00] Marly McMillen: Hey, everyone. I’m happy to have on the show today, John Greely, he’s with the company Slickstream. Hey  ohn, welcome to the Chopped Podcast. I am so glad to have you here. I think we’re going to be talking about some things that I think everybody’s going to be excited to hear, so we should just get started.

Don’t you think? So, can you tell me about Slickstream and you know, what the company is and when it was founded and what it does.

John Greely: Sure. Slickstream is a company, basically designed for publishers to increase their onsite engagement. And so the mission sprung from essentially the thought that there are a lot of options for publishers of how to bring people onto their site, through SEO, a lot of solutions in place that bring traffic in and then kind of a dearth of options of what to do once you have traffic on the site.

So. We have the mission of increasing engagement on your site, by providing your users, your visitors, any number of different ways to interact and to find the content that they’re looking for specifically. [00:01:00] So Slickstream was founded by a Kingston Duffy. This is his fourth Silicon Valley tech company, and he had a few of his previous coworkers, Carl Hubbard and Preet Shihn, decided they wanted to try something new about four years ago, five years ago now, and sort of had a little incubator of different the ideas and the publishing space that they wanted to work with some around data visualization, some otherwise.

And it was about 2018, November, 2018 that, the idea of Slickstream itself kind of came into being. So one of the earliest adopters of Slickstream was Pinch of Yum. Bjork Ostrom, was put in touch with Kingston, and they were sort of this great teacher user early on in, well, what does a site need?

How do you increase a site? What are the best practices? And then sort of growing through that beta early adopter stage. It wasn’t until October of this past year. So October, 2019 that we left beta and Slickstream, as it currently is, it’s released to the world.

[00:02:00] Marly McMillen: I love it. Because it sounds to me like you said we want to solve a problem. And then you went in search of what that problem was that he wanted to solve. Basically.

John Greely: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly it is. Is this the space? The publisher space, especially is so important and gets so much traffic. There’s so much value to be had there, but it’s also pretty underserved. You know, these publishers and a lot of cases are working with, You know, WordPress widgets that they’re collecting and trying to find out on their own, whether or not these are interacting well with each other, they’re working with their developers.

It’s sort of a wild west in a lot of ways, and that just feels wrong. It feels like there is so much potential there for, for companies to step in and provide a little more comprehensive solutions. You know, there’s nothing wrong with these, with the WordPress widget space, but sometimes  it’s very difficult for an individual publisher, particularly one without a full team at their disposal to manage all of it. I mean, honestly, there’s just so much out there. So getting help and podcasts like this one and, and [00:03:00] what, what Bjork and Lindsay do with Food Blogger Pro as well. Those are really valuable for the information. and then sometimes it just feels like the tools need to need to have caught up.

Marly McMillen: Yeah, I love that. And in fact, it, you know, when I was getting my MBA, we would do a lot of case studies of a lot of different programs or different companies. I remember one in particular was about problem solving and they actually talked about a university that they built the university, they built the campus, and then they didn’t put any sidewalks in because they waited to see where the people were walking and that’s where they decided to put the sidewalks in.

And to me, that’s what I’m kind of hearing you say is like, it’s a really smart company that kind of listens. It’s not, you’re not out there trying to force your solution on people. You’re actually listening. Like what are the real problems that people are experiencing and how can we be a part of solving them?

John Greely: That is exactly right. I think that is exactly kind of the attitude we’re trying to take to it. We’re not trying to sell you a solution that doesn’t work because that doesn’t help anybody.

Well, if our users are successful, you know, this is one of those situations where we charge [00:04:00] based on pages. That’s how we incur costs. And that’s the way that we make our money, but it’s also the way that our publishers make money. So when they’re getting more page views, which is our intention, it’s a mutually beneficial situation.

So there’s literally no incentive for us to try to sell a product. that’s not doing the absolute utmost that it can be. Right. So we’re using these, the sidewalk treads, right? The tread on the grass to determine, Oh, this is a valuable area to explore more. And that’s really, what’s guiding our product philosophy.

Marly McMillen: Yes, I like that. Okay. So let’s go into this a little bit because I, I loved what you said earlier on about how so many things are trying to help us get more traffic, but then what do we do with that traffic once it gets there? And I think it can be a lost opportunity if somebody comes on the site and then they leave and then there’s no opportunity for engagement.

And so if you could talk a little bit, I I’m most intrigued of course, by the little hearts. And could you talk about the hearts?

John Greely: You know, this is sort of a social proof. it shows that people are [00:05:00] engaging with the content. They’re pretty, they fit that sort of, social media mindset that a lot of visitors are engaging with these days, particularly since so much traffic is on your phon e, that having the hearts feels pretty intuitive, but we really were shocked with the uptake.

The hearts were sort of a fun little idea, and then it turns out that they get used like crazy. So just the little fluttering alone draws a little bit affordance. It shows people that these exist in the corner. And for those who haven’t seen it, it’s essentially. A heart icon in the bottom, right corner of the page that when you click on it, it sends heart’s fluttering onto the page and shows other users who are currently on the page that somebody from, in my case, let’s say Santa Monica, or in your case, Kansas City has liked this content that they’re currently on.

So, it’s social proof that this person, that this article is being browsed right now. And it’s a means for visitors to express their appreciation for the content, which has then loved. So your most popular article on your site might have thousands and thousands of, favorites already. whereas you know, a new one might, might start [00:06:00] from scratch. That uptake the amount of people using it surprised us dramatically.

It’s about six to six and a half percent of total page views results in a favorite on sites that have them.

Marly McMillen: Wow. So that kind of, what that tells me is that, it’s really surprising that there wasn’t some other way for, you know, people can leave a comment, they can leave a review, but those feel a little, like, you know, you’ve got to do some investment there. It’s surprising me to think that, you know, we hadn’t had something like this all long.  Where people can just tap on it and indicate that they like this recipe.

John Greely: Right. And then what we found from that is that there’s a lot more utility beyond just expressing the appreciation. It does help guide publishers in terms of what content has a high favorites to pageviews ratio. So if 10% of people or favoriting this content, this is the kind of content that your audience generally wants, or these, the audiences found it appropriately either from your acquisition strategy or whatever else.

Whereas if it’s lower, perhaps this was maybe a mismatch of content and [00:07:00] audience. It also is a means to enable, email collection. This was sort of where the functionality followed the treadmarks, and I’m going to keep using this metaphor because I love it, so it followed the grass treading where people were using favorites and  then we decided, well, what happens after you’ve used the favorites?

We should have a means to save it. So those favorites are saved within your browser, but if you wanted to sync it to a different browser or your phone or anything else, you need to create an email. You need to sync it with an email address. We have no interest in the email addresses of the users of your site, but you do.

So that’s why we added an optin button on top of that opt into collecting those email addresses for your subscriber list. So there’s just a lot of overlap with these engagement tools. An engaged user is a user that’s valuable to do a blogger. That’s kind of the person that you’re really targeting. and so capturing that value is really important to us and it started with little people, use favorites and then it grew from there.

Marly McMillen: Well, it kind of reminds me of sales 101 too, right. Where, you know, [00:08:00] you just want to get them to do something .They need to take, even just the smallest amount of action improves the odds that they’re going to take some other kinds of actions. So that seems like, you know, of course we’d like them to subscribe or leave a comment or leave a review.  There’s other options, but those are bigger, and so I feel like this is just like, it’s just like a, a little, a little skip. It’s a little step on the, on the grass, a little tread, the very first step to help them start walking on the path. And I just, I don’t know. I just, I think that’s really important.

John Greely: Yeah. And you know, I think that your, your, your point about comments is a good one because comments have existed for forever on the internet. That’s, that’s the  kind of the traditional. If you want to leave feedback on a post, leave a comment, the comments are tough. They require moderation. They can be abused by bots or spam.

And, you know, even if you’re a user, you have to sometimes create an account. If you don’t have to create an account, you might not know that. You have to do the capture. It’s just a lot more, and it doesn’t sound like a lot when you describe the individual steps, but it’s a lot more than just clicking a heart.

[00:09:00] Marly McMillen: Right. Exactly. And are you saying that I would then also be able to know who was doing that? In other words, I’d be able to have the email addresses of people who clicked the heart.

John Greely: So, yes and no, there is a means for that. We don’t track that specifically. We really have no interest in people’s personal data. The data we collect is anonymized, but let’s say that you have a user on your site that really likes your content is favoriting all sorts of things. It would kind of be lost opportunity for that person to not then be able to sign up for a newsletter.

So when they subscribe or when they start create a, an account with Slickstream so that they can see their favorites, they can save their favorite recipes, for example. So a lot of our recipe sites use this. It’s kind of creating your own little recipe list and then to save that list, you need an email to sync it to.

And that email address, you can then, on the prompt, opt in to sign up for your newsletter. So the uptake on that is not particularly high when favoriting is not, It’s not prompting for it. You know, if you’re, if you’re only requiring people who have decided, Oh, I actually want to save these favorites.

[00:10:00] Not that many people go through that process. What some of our sites have done. The ones that particularly value email addresses for their lists is making that mandatory or these prompted, when somebody favorites something. So you see that the favorites, you see the, the hearts are fluttering the corner, you’re like, Oh, I want, I want to favorite this, this recipe as well. You click it in the bottom. Right. And it says great to use favoriting, just sign up for the newsletter. No, that is not a requirement that most of the rest sites don’t do that. But if you’re, if your goal really is around email collection, it can be another way to drive that.

Marly McMillen: I see. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So what I like about all of this though, is that like, like you said earlier, I feel like this takes something that’s very successful on social media. Like, let’s talk about Instagram or all I have to do is double tap on the photo. It shows that I liked it and I, you know, I move on, That’s to me what feels like is happening here when I’m on a site.

And I see that heart, I click, you know, I feel like I’m sending a message to the blogger. Like I really like this. This is really good. And I don’t know, there’s a, [00:11:00] there’s some kind of  interaction that goes there. I think it’s really smart.

John Greely: Honestly, that’s the first and foremost thing about favorites. None of that other stuff works unless people like to do it right. And there’s such a community feel in the blogging space in general, but particularly in the food blogging space. You know, the reason that that a lot of these bloggers are doing what they do, isn’t all money. It’s not this, you know, to maximize the amount of money that they’re getting from their site.

That’s important, but they’re doing it for their visitors. They’re doing it because they would want to share the content that they put their heart and soul with into the world. And it feels good to, as a user validate that. And as a publisher to get that feedback,

Marly McMillen: Right. Exactly. And I think we’re all looking for things that can, you know, you can spend a lot of time on getting more traffic and that’s important too, but what about the notion of what we do with those people when they, when they arrive here. When they’re on your site and are there ways to increase engagement and, or, you know, we want that [00:12:00] dwell time.

Maybe you have a higher dwell time on those pages that have more hearts on it. So I I’d be interested. I think on the data side, it would be very interesting too.

John Greely: Yeah, it really is. And this is one of the nice things about the position we’re in is we get to see a lot of macro level data. One of the things that surprised us a little bit is that. Everybody knows that your revenue corresponds to your page views. You have RPMs, that’s revenue  per a thousand page views.

What might surprise you is it actually doesn’t depend on it increasing page views to increase revenue. Active time on site, which is adjacent to, but not the same as the way that Google measures your session, your average session duration, but the amount of time that a user spends actively on your site is directly correlated with the amount of revenue. So you can get more revenue from ads refreshing on a page that somebody is engaging with either by clicking favorites or playing a game in the corner, or just being on the recipe that they wanted to be on. That’s more valuable than having them click around a bunch of interstitial pages or be navigating your site, which might create more pageviews, but in fact, it wouldn’t create more revenue [00:13:00] for you.

Marly McMillen: Okay. So that’s, that’s another thing that we should talk about. I actually haven’t experimented too much with that part. And that is, there is an opportunity for people to play games on your site.

John Greely: Yes, that’s minor. We have turned the core features of the engagement suite, which is our main product. The core features are our search discovery and engagement. So favorites. The search tool and then sort of the film strips, which are content recommendation a fourth one, what? We have five that we list the fourth, the fourth would be analytics and the fifth would be these games right now.

We just have the one which is sort of a tile slider. It’s recommended content based on the content you’re already on, but it’s just a fun, little way for you to slide around an image. And so many of these images, particularly on food blogs are so pretty to begin with, but you slide around the tiles until it gives you the recommended content at the end.

And then you can click through to it. You know, it’s not, it’s not high tech, this isn’t something crazy, but it’s another means that’s optional for [00:14:00] users to stay on your site and engage more with your content. And we find that the uptake on that is not small.

Marly McMillen: And what do you mean by that?

John Greely: Sorry, Just people are using it. It’s not, it’s not the biggest part we do.

It’s probably the smallest of the four in terms of the engagement, but it’s significant enough that we continue to support it. And we continue to suggest it for publishers who are looking for more ways to get people, to engage with their site.

Marly McMillen: So again, I want to go to this point of, like, let’s say, let’s say somebody coming to a page it’s maybe it’s brownies and they’re, they’re a little skeptical. They’re like, you know, I just feel like there are some people who are just looking to be convinced that this is the recipe they want to use or otherwise they’re just going to click back and go find another one.

And, and I feel like having something that engages them on the page helps kind of break down that wall of skepticism a little bit and they start to, you know, buy into, Oh, I like this recipe.

John Greely: Yes. I mean, absolutely. A concern among publishers, which is real about being too busy. We don’t want to have too much [00:15:00] affordance on the page, but you know, our kind of ideal use cases, let’s say that you’re searching for, you know, chocolate chip cookies, right. And you search Google and you find this and you click on it. And it says, Oh, this has 33,000 favorites in the bottom right. You can tell because it’s very similar to the way that you’ve been using social media at the time. Oh, 33,000 people have liked this. That’s that’s social proof right off the bat. And so then you read the recipe, you think, Oh, this was good. You save it by favoriting it, you know, you’re like, Oh, I like this.

You, you either print it out or whatever it is. But before you go, when you’re scrolling back up, Oh, there is a filmstrip toolbar, which is kind of like the checkout aisle, the little, you know, you buy a little candy at the checkout aisle. You’re like, Oh, actually I had been looking for a good brownie recipe.

You click on that one and it takes you directly to more content that’s interesting to you. Maybe then from that your session continues by saying, you know, actually one other thing I’ve been searching for and you click the search box and then our search has generally, we’re very proud of our search.

We think it’s a really good experience and it’s certainly, more so than the standard WordPress experience. It’s reactive [00:16:00] searches, you type category based and even ingredient based. So I can get into all that later, but the idea is that user might have just gone, even if they got exactly what they wanted, they might’ve gone to your site and bounced.

They might’ve gone to your site and gone to print page and left. We’re trying to take that user who’s had a successful experience and translate it into a more successful experience that generates more revenue for the, for the publisher.

Marly McMillen: Oh, yeah, there’s so much there to unpack. I, I don’t even know where to start, but I think the idea that, you know, somebody can come to the page and find a way to be engaged with the page. I think, it makes a big difference. I love the fact that you have data on the back end. So  I went to your site and looked at testimonials and I see that people are actually using the data that you provide to understand their audience better and then deliver better content as a result.

John Greely: Yeah, that’s, that’s one of the, again, the privileged things about the position we’re in is we just get to see so much. So, the analytics that we  provide within the engagement suite are largely tailored to your own site, but we also are trying more and more [00:17:00] to understand the way that it relates to the competitive market in general, to other food blogs, for food bloggers, to other verticals as well.

So the analytics we’re providing. You know, we want people to use them. We want them to be valuable. A lot of people come in and they just want, they see the favorites and think I want that. Or they see the surgeon and say, I want that. But when you get the full ecosystem, it’s almost, it’s almost too enticing the analytics to use it as well.

Because content planning is so important. And if you see, for example, that your most favorited, the highest percentage of favorites in any article that you get, let’s say it’s 15% of page views are favoriting. This, Let’s say a Curry recipe, right? 15% of page views are resulting in favorites. You want to be promoting that more that’s popular content that people are really enjoying, and you either want to be creating more Curry content in that case, or featuring this content either in newsletters or social media or elsewhere to drive more people to it.

Right. Or maybe you’re seeing that the, the, the, you did an advertising campaign that [00:18:00] was leading people to that. And it was resulting in very low, favorite percentage. You want that information as well to guide who maybe I should be using a different piece of content.

Marly McMillen: Maybe it needs updated pictures or something like that. There’s a lot of things you could be looking at on that page to say, Hey, what can I do to increase engagement here?

John Greely: That is absolutely right. And I don’t mean for it to just be about the favoriting percentages as well, because there’s a lot of other insights that we get. So if you’re on the cookie page, What percentage of people clicked through to the brownie page, right? Or what was the most commonly clicked through to page from there?

Those kinds of those kinds of insights allow come a little more content clustering for publishers. Just in terms of, Oh, this content is like this other content and that’s not necessarily how you create it. But it can be how you analyze it. And you think about it within, you know, what else you need to be publishing.

Marly McMillen: I feel like, obviously that’s data that’s available on Google analytics, but it takes a little bit of a fortitude to figure that [00:19:00] out. And so it seems to me like what I’m hearing you say is Slickstream has this data as well, but it’s maybe a little bit easier to understand?

John Greely: Yeah. You know, we certainly hope for that to be the case. We are nowhere near as robust of an analytics. We just Google analytics and we’re not trying to supplant it just to supplement it. We integrate with Google analytics so we can be sending we’ll fire events when somebody does an action with Slickstream on your site.

And that can get sent to Google analytics if you, if you choose to. and then we’ve been, you know, th the pageview counts, aren’t, aren’t identical, there’s some body identification components that are gonna cause a small discrepancy, but for the most part, you know, we’re able to see your traffic. Google analytics is also able to see your traffic in much the same way, and we’re able to integrate as well. So you can see Slickstreams, performance within Google analytics.

Marly McMillen: Google analytics offers so much, and yet they’re not able to take advantage of it just because of the learning curve it takes to understand ot, even just, if it was for the tool of getting more user-friendly analytics. It might be worth it just from that perspective.

John Greely: Yeah. And look [00:20:00] for first of all, for people who feel inadequate with their Google analytics mastery, like I’ve been working professionally with Google analytics for my entire career. And I don’t understand half of it. Right. I mean, that’s the, that’s the level of complexity the Google analytics has. there’s no shame in that.

But that said, yeah, so our analytics, we were working on it.  It’s a good experience. We think we can always make it better. But one of the bits of feedback that we’ve recently listened to was around just making it easier to understand the performance of a post, right. Because about a week after you’ve had a post, you want to know.

So how did that do. So one thing that we’re now providing based on user feedback is called an engagement report. And this is essentially just a standard templatized email. Okay. It goes to you a week after having published a piece of content. These are purely optional. You can opt out of it and that many of our users do, but if they’re actually, we found that they’ve provided pretty valuable, where it says here’s how many pages this got here’s the percentage of favorites received.

Here’s you know, all of these various, components of its performance. and it’s [00:21:00] always a week after publishing, so you can compare it apples to apples. And it also, we have some fun facts where if it’s performing very highly in one category or very, you know, just differently than the rest of your content, we’ll flag that up.

Marly McMillen: Nice. Nice. I love that. I, again, I just, I think that’s an opportunity for people to really, you know, there’s so much user information in there and I feel like it’s been something that’s been lacking a long time in blogging, and that is. There, you can feel a little, like you’re kind of removed you’re, you’re doing this.

And then people come you, your site, you know, you post the, you know, we talked about cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and then people come to that chocolate chip cookie post and they have a reaction to it. And you want to understand what that reaction is.  It’s easy to feel a little removed from that.

Maybe they leave a comment, but maybe you’re only getting from the comments from the people who really love it, or really hate it. But hearing from the people in between or being able to at least suss out that information is really helpful.

John Greely: Yeah. And that’s there’s, this is something we [00:22:00] actually recently just talking about is there can be this selection bias for publishers, where you want to be focused on your super fans, the fans that really love you and are going to be with you. And that’s great. And you should absolutely optimize for the people that like your content that’s, who you’re doing this for.

They’re the ones that are gonna be sharing it going forward, but they’re not the only people consuming your content. Right. It’s not, it’s not only super fans clicking on your stuff. In fact, the vast majority are going to people coming from elsewhere. And so it’s really important to understand the way that they’re perceiving it as well.

And it can be, it can be easy for publishers to fall into the trap of, I received three emails saying this, so therefore it’s fact, right. That can be very indicative of, of what’s happening, but it’s not always the case.

Marly McMillen: Right. Exactly. So we’ll move past the hearts, even though I hesitate to leave that I like it so much. But I do like the fact that you have this search feature. And I don’t know if everybody understands that just  out of the box, WordPress does not, it offers a search feature, but it’s not very, [00:23:00] it’s not very good.

And it’s, you know, it’s not very user friendly for sure. And so Slickstream probably saw that as an opportunity as well. Like if we’re going to do this and we’re going to be a plugin let’s, let’s provide us a really good search feature as well.

John Greely: Everybody places value on in some capacity on your site. It’s not used as often as publishers necessarily think that it would be their search, our search anybody’s search. but it is so important in those sessions that are going to result in multiple page views for people to find what they’re looking for.

And so when you were creating search originally, you know, basically it was well we’re categorizing all your data for recommendations anyway, so it’s really value. You know, we have the ability to find the data. Well, that’s one of our core competencies, but what features are valuable. So as you type results is really important, that’s something that’s, that’s lacking from, from builtin, WordPress search, it’s something that allows you just to find the content that you’re looking for more quickly without having to go to a second page and you can just type chocolate, you know, Chaco and it’ll populate all the results with chocolate in it. As you go,

Marly McMillen: It’s called predictive typing, [00:24:00] right?

John Greely: Exactly. and so we’re able to, we’re able to pull that, but then what we found is, Oh, well, publishers were interested in also categories, you know, desserts would, would crop up when you searched chocolate chip or maybe I want to just search breakfast.

Right. So then we were able to categorize based on categories that you have in your site map. So we’re able to auto-populate categories as well as part of the site’s set up. And then from there that that tool turned out to be really useful and interesting. And from there said, well, what about ingredients?

Because a lot of these sites in the recipe space, and, the majority of our users are currently in the recipe space. We are not exclusive to the food space, but it’s certainly where we found our first niche. And we’ve developed some features for it, including ingredient based search. So if you have your ingredients categorized in the traditional way that they would display on Google, which is dot Json, We are able to parse that and then find ingredients.

So you could then say, I want to search ingredients, click on ingredient, search within Slickstreams search panel and say chocolate chips. It’ll find all the recipes with chocolate chips [00:25:00] or, or eggs or milk. So it’s a way you can say, what do I have in the fridge? I’m going to search this site and turn all of that out.

And again, this isn’t groundbreaking technology in the sense that other stuff search tools are able to do some of these components. What we’re trying to do is provide an as sort of an all in one suite that enables you to have access to some of these more professional features within the context of a, of a tool for bloggers like you, right?

Marly McMillen: Food bloggers are really busy. We wear a lot of hats and so,  over finessing our categories,  maybe we have a dessert or sweets or maybe even cookies. But to take it down to chocolate or, you know, that’s, it’s a lot of work to go through and do all of that. Whereas you’re just kind of saying tadah! Here it is.

John Greely: Yes. And you know, the ingredients one is funny because you might think that you turn up, if you’re searching chocolate chips, you’ll find chocolate chips. Why do you need the ingredients search specifically? But  this was, was feedback from publishers that led to it. This was one of those areas where [00:26:00] publishers were like, what about ingredient search?

I have, you know, we’ve heard this from visitors. They want, they say they have these three things in their kitchen. How do they find the content that matches that. It just turned out that that was something that we were able to do based on existing structured data within your site. So the work that the bloggers have already done, wasn’t being fully used.

And now we’re trying to make sure that it is, is to find that value, that the bulk of the work that’s already in place.

Marly McMillen: And what I’m trying to say is like, if somebody had the wherewithal and they wanted to do that manually on their own, the amount of work it would take, especially once you get over a certain number of blog posts, it would take a lot of work to do that manually. Whereas you’re right. I mean, if you have a data, the databases right there, why not just,  use the data that’s already there and say, chocolate, here you go.

John Greely: Well exactly. And it’s so hard, you know, for a blogger to come in and let’s say, you’ve built your audience organically. You started out as a team of one. Maybe you now have a team of three or four, you know, maybe social media, et cetera, but like you’re a successful blogger. That doesn’t mean you’re a statistician. That doesn’t mean you’re a web developer.

That doesn’t mean, you know, [00:27:00] how to do every single component that goes into running the business of being a blog. It’s really valuable that there’s so many tools to educate, but it’s also unfeasible for every, everybody to be an expert in everything.

Marly McMillen: Right.

John Greely: Yeah. It’s one of the biggest challenges that we’ve heard from our publishers is just knowing what to do and knowing that you’re not missing out and you’re not doing stuff wrong.  That your WordPress plugins are all playing nice and that you’re  optimizingind all the right ways.

And there’s just this serious sense of kind of FOMO. Right? Am I doing things right? Am I missing some opportunity? So ,having a service where, you know, we will often, for example, we have a very high-touch customer service, especially in the onboarding stage. But we’ll often we’re indexing a site find, Oh, you know, your site map is, is funky in these ways.

And it’s causing a bunch of missed traffic here. You know, this, this site is not showing up in Google search results. For example, is something that we see sometimes, or just understanding your site in and of itself can, [00:28:00] can provide extra value. Yeah. That doesn’t have anything to do with, with our components.

Marly McMillen: It sounds like such a relief. Like somebody’s got your back. You’re busy doing five thousand things and you don’t realize your site map isn’t working. So, it’s, it’s wonderful to hear that.

John Greely: And it really does come back to our mission, which is to be your ally, right? Your success is our success at Slickstream, which is just so important for, you know, it’s not a, we’re trying to take advantage of publishers.

Selling solutions that are gonna work. They’re not going to use us. Nobody benefits. This is one of those we’re trying to create solutions that are best for you. Not only in the short term, but in the long term.

Marly McMillen: Yes, I love it. And so let’s talk about the filmstrip feature. I, I think that’s, it’s, it’s a great tool and I feel like some people have plugins on their site that it something like,  content that’s related to this content. And I feel like that’s what that film strip is doing.

John Greely: Yes. And you know, there are familiar, [00:29:00] our filmstrip is, is not dissimilar from any carousel or tool or widget. You might’ve seen this just related to content. We, that hasn’t come up. We like a lot, like it’s a scrollable it’s based on our recommendation engine so that the results are good, but the idea of it is not unique. I think that’s safe to say.

Marly McMillen: Yes, but it’s a little, again, it’s a little bit like social media where I may be looking at one post, but I can see the other ones right there. Whereas if you’re on a blog post, you really just see that one recipe. So it’s kind of a way of enticing them to, to look at other, other content.

John Greely: Yeah, and that’s the check-it-out component I was talking about earlier. There are two ways that we can display the film. Strip. One is inline sorts, always displayed at the top of the post. Some publishers like that. Some don’t the other is sticky, which sticks to the top. So you scroll down and when you start scrolling back up, you see the filmstrip appear with related content.

That content is powered by the same thing that powers our search. It’s the discovery engine or the recommendation engine I should say, that [00:30:00] that indexes your whole site, finds the connections between this content and other content and says, Oh, people really like to click on this content from this page. So we’re going to display that near the top.

That is a relatively sophisticated – there’s machine learning on the backend that populates that. And when you choose to display, it is, is more up to the publisher. But what we do find is that including the film strip is the biggest impact on page views that we can provide.

Marly McMillen: Really. So do you see impact on bounce rate?

John Greely: So I can’t isolate the impact of the filmstrip specifically on bounce rate ,but we do as, and I can talk about, a lot of our testing results at some point, but yes, with Slickstream, we do see a statistically significant decrease in bounce rate. it’s about in the order of one to one and a half percent on average, percentage points. but the filmstrip itself. Would be a component of that.

We don’t have that effect isolated, but the pageview increase is [00:31:00] very specific to the film strip. That’s the checkout aisle. That’s the, you browse the content and you’re like, Oh, actually let me click on this.

Marly McMillen: When they click on that, it’s essentially a drop in the bounce rate. Right?

John Greely: Yeah, it absolutely would be . There is sort of, and we can talk about this this more if we’re talking about the impact, but there is sort of a, a tricky statistical phenomenon that, that even surprised us a little bit, which is that a lot of your page views are hard to affect within Slickstream, because a lot of your pageviews, every, every session is going to get one to begin with.

So anything that you’re doing with an engagement on your site is only working with additional page views, right? We can’t change the amount of one page view that you get from, from a user coming in to begin with. So that’s awesome then, depending on, let’s say that you have a  1.5 pageviews per session, which would be very good.

That means that we can only affect about a third of your total pages. And so then driving clicks up in that is going to, Increase page views, but not by as much as you might necessarily expect. [00:32:00] So what we’ve found is, if you can drive about 18% more clicks, which is what this film strip often does that translates to about a 2% increase in page views.

And it’s really all coming from those, those return users, the users that are really enjoying the content that you have that have found what they were looking for.

Marly McMillen: Interesting. So the increase in page views then could possibly pay for the service itself. Right?

John Greely: Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what we’ve found to be the case is we’re, we’re generally generating around a two X ROI. We don’t, we don’t guarantee anything. And in fact, for smaller sites, we have a minimum pricing. So, in, in their cases we might not be generating the ad revenue that makes up for the cost in and of itself, but in most cases we do.

Marly McMillen: You find that as a site gets bigger then you’re able to probably impact their revenue even more.

John Greely: Yeah, both as a raw number and as a percentage, we actually find that that big sites are often able to perform.  They’re generally structured in such a way that they’re getting more page views per session big sites. If they’ve, if they’ve done the right things and they’ve gotten big. There, there are [00:33:00] exceptions to the rule, of course, but, the more return visitors, the more pageviews per session that you’re getting, the more impact that we can have.

Marly McMillen: And when you’re talking about big site, I don’t know if you could put a number to that. Are you talking about people who are getting more than a hundred thousand page views a month or is it higher than that?

John Greely: But, you know, for, for us, a bigger site would probably be in the 1 million plus range. We have sites from 25,000 pageviews a month to a 25 million, a little more. So we, we run a pretty large swath, with our, with our pricing. Our minimum prices is $25, which kicks into effect at 200,000. So for anybody over 200,000, we’re generally generating more revenue than we’re

Marly McMillen: But I love that you’re seeing  backend data on a large variety of sites then. And as a result, I think what I’m hearing you say is that the larger sites really already do a very good job of generating more page views per visit.

John Greely: Yes. And you know, there’s, there are of course exceptions. [00:34:00] If you’re optimizing for search traffic, then sometimes the incentives are going to be not around quality of content, but around quantity of content. But that’s, if you’re up there optimizing for just getting a bunch of search traffic and that’s one time bounce.

So we’ve seen sites that have very high bounce rates because they’re coming largely from search. Our philosophy though, is, is around user experience. It really is. If you’re building things the right way, it means focusing on user experience, focusing on delivering the right content and not immediately worrying  about monetization.

You know, the ad networks are great. It’s a great resource for bloggers, but there’s this dynamic between bloggers and their ad networks sometimes where they want to monetize. They want to show ads, but sometimes the ads can be overall intrusive. And what our philosophy is is if you build an organic return audience by delivering them the content that they’re looking for consistently that will have compounding effects over time, that will be significantly more than any short term sacrifices for revenue right now.

Based on delivering a worse user experience, you know, and this isn’t, this isn’t about ad [00:35:00] network specifically, just that like the, the sacrifices that you might make to, to maximize right now, I think are often counterproductive rather than delighting your users and encouraging them to return.

Marly McMillen: So in other words, what I think I’m hearing you say is that, some short term sacrifice we might be considering to make would be to take the advertising down just a little bit so that you increase the user experience and then they want to come back doubling your advertising rate, basically.

John Greely: That would be, yeah. And that’s, and that’s what we’ve seen. And that’s a hundred percent what we’ve seen in sites that we consider to be adhering to best practices is they’re building an engaged audience that’s returning. And those return visitors are just so much more valuable if you’re returning and getting multiple pages per session, that will definitely supersede short term benefits from intrusive, it doesn’t have to be ads, it can be a non, non skippable, opt-in  requests, for example. The things that users might say is, ugh, I don’t like this. Right? They might have [00:36:00] value to you now, but overall those users would be more valuable if you can delight just a portion of them.

Marly McMillen: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s easy to be too shortsighted on that to think, Oh, well, if I have more ads per page, but I’ll make more money per visit, but yeah, it’s, I think it’s always good to, first of all, just get this feedback that, you’ve got to keep an eye on that.  It is kind of a bad user experience to have too many ads.

John Greely: Well, so to, to that effect, we actually, in a lot of our AB testing we’ve seen, so we know that we increase page views by roughly 2%, sometimes 2 – 3%. I think that that much is pretty straight forward. Oh, Slickstream on site increased pageviews, but it’s actually not entirely based on pages per session.

Pages per session, we increase, but we also increase sessions per user. So when you’re thinking about how do I increase my overall traffic, a lot of bloggers will start with the impression, well, I have to get more people coming in. That’s true, but you also have to get more people [00:37:00] doing more onsite and get more people returning a second time.

So over the course of a week of AB testing, we might see and have seen recently, that you know, about a half a percent more people return a second time for another session. So a half a percent increase in sessions per user is just as valuable as anything else. It’s pageviews per session. And when you combine those two, you get the overall pageview impact.

But I think really when, when bloggers are focusing on building that organic audience sessions per user needs to be a metric that they’re focusing on. It’s not just the amount of page views per session, and it’s not just the amount of sessions, right? There’s a lot of different ways to increase overall overall traffic.

Marly McMillen: Thank you for clarifying that, because when you first said that I was thinking what would be the difference between pageviews per session and sessions per user, but I wasn’t thinking about return visitors. So that makes sense. We would love to have them coming back. And, of course, clicking on multiple pages when they’re there, but yes. Okay.

John Greely: Yeah. And it’s not really, even, it’s not even, [00:38:00] you know, all that unintuitive to think about, you know, if somebody comes in from Google and has never seen your site before they come in and they get a, they get a good experience, they get exactly what they’re looking for, where the means to find exactly what they’re looking for.

They’re more likely to say next time they’re browsing Google and see your site come up. Or the next time they’re even just thinking, I want to go directly to a site that I trust.  They might not all do it, but even a 0.5% impact there is compounding over time. . It’s another user that’s coming in.

It’s another user that’s telling their friends, it’s more traffic coming to your site from them, and that effect I think is subtle and it’s sometimes can be hard to communicate, but it’s, it’s pretty inevitable. You give a user a better experience. They’re going to be more likely to be a return user.

Marly McMillen: Well, and there’s also that side thing that they might actually tell somebody else about your site too. And that is really exciting! I’ve done it, like maybe I’m listening to a podcast I really love, and I tell a friend like, Oh, you’ve got to check this out. we all want to be that right? We want to create a site.That’s so exciting that people want to tell everybody else about it.

[00:39:00] John Greely: Yeah, there’s just, there’s just this phenomenon. I fell victim to it just like anybody, but there’s this, you know, you want to be focusing on the tactics. You want to be thinking like, I want to do this and this and this best practice, and that’s going to make my site successful. But you can do all of the right things for a site with bad content and nobody’s ever going to come because it’s not, it’s not the site that they want to go to, right? Nobody’s gonna tell their friends go to this site. It has bad content, but it advertised to me appropriately. Right? So, and that that’s exactly what I think almost every blogger wants to hear is create good content. And then as your best practices and the organic audience growth is going to follow.

Marly McMillen: Yeah. I always feel like those, sometimes it’s a little bit ambiguous though. I’m like, you know, create good content to me. It’s like, well, just could you be more specific? You know, and I, that’s what I’m saying. I feel like you’re kind of giving the data to say, look, this page is doing really well. This is an example of good content.

Create more content like that.

John Greely: Yeah. And there’s, you know, there’s, there’s all sorts of great, great services and great options for you to understand [00:40:00] what kind of content you were, the one producing. We’re just trying to understand, like our job in this, our job in this ecosystem is to understand what’s going on in your site and communicate it to you and try to optimize what we can with your visitors coming in.

Marly McMillen: I know the question that everybody’s going to have is about site speed. So how does Slickstream impact the site speed for a site?

John Greely: Minimally. It’s probably the number one priority  that our engineering team focuses on. We have a countless tests both on AB tests. The answer is minimally. I say not zero because it’s impossible to have zero impact. Right? We are injecting something within the browser. what we have found is that it can sometimes be tough for a publisher to parse the difference in sitespeed, based on the timing of something loading, right? So there’s, there’s things like time to page and this isn’t my entire, I’m the marketing guy, right? This is, this is not the technical component of my expertise, but there’s a difference, for example, in when [00:41:00] Slickstream loads or when everything has fully loaded on your page. Ads are by and large the thing that loads last. They just take, they take the longest to take the most amount of resources. So, it’s a tricky one where we want to offer them the option. And in fact, we just rolled out a big sitespeed focused thing for Slickstream to load in front, if that’s what the publisher wants to focus on. Because sometimes you want to be showing your ads first, so that you’re most likely to recruit that value to get the monetized value. If somebody bounces  before they see an ad, that pageview was worth nothing to you. So we were trying to strike a balance between making Slickstream accessible immediately or not impacting adversely your revenue. And the best, the best case I can make forward is that we’ve seen the positive revenue impact and we’re able to, to evaluate those independently.

Marly McMillen: Okay. Great. And I know that I’ve, I’ve seen the testimonials on, on your blog or on your, or your site, and it looks like the people that are using it are very happy with it.  Are you doing evaluations and getting feedback from your influencers that are using [00:42:00] it and understanding what the problems are in real time?

John Greely: Constantly. I mean, so we have a, we have a 30-day trial, that’s free, there’s not even a credit card. So people come in and they’ll try to, you know, they’ll try out Sllickstream’s tools, and about halfway through that, I email you saying, Hey, I want your feedback. My name is John and I need to hear from you and you would be amazed how many people respond to it.

I love it so much. I love it when it’s negative. I just love that people are taking the time to help us improve our product. so constantly monitoring that. It’s what guides any of our product decisions. we have great relationships with our existing customers of which we above I think 300 now. but you know, that’s how we hear about, A),any bugs or glitches with the new release or new features that they want work done, but B) it’s how we take the temperature of the space. It’s how we understand how food bloggers are feeling. It really became important, kind of a right in the height of the uncertainty in March around COVID.

We in fact ended up, doing a temporary, 50% price [00:43:00] adjustment, price decrease because, RPMs have been so had been so shredded, and it was devastating to the publisher’s revenues. And now we’ve actually done a fair amount of analysis around it and have seen that RPMs are kind of on the, on the way back up pageview are on the way back a little bit down from there, from there, huge spike in the food blogging space while everybody was staying home.

But those are the kinds of things that we, we value so much when we hear from customers. Because again, if we’re going to have a mutually beneficial relationship, we just, we need to understand what their priorities are.

Marly McMillen: Yes, exactly. And I feel like if anybody wants to see a good example of, of Slickstream in action, I think going to Pinch of Yum, with Bjork and Lindsay is a great way to get to see it and see what it looks like and kind of interact with it a little bit too.

John Greely: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. We love Pinch of Yum. We’ve, appeared actually on the Food Blogger Pro podcast before with them. Kingston did a long interview with that. You know, they, I think go to Pinch of Yum. I don’t want to pitch a bunch of  [00:44:00] websites here, but, they’re a good example.

And I think if I were to direct you to notice anything. It’s the way that we blend into the site, because we’re not about being Slickstream. We’re not about being, I mean, some thing that you recognize as us and, and, having a lot of afforded specific to us and looking like we’re tacked on, we want to look like we’re part of the site.

Not only because it makes publishers happy, but because it creates a better overall user experience.

Marly McMillen: Can you talk a little bit about Slickstream Stories? I know it’s something that’s coming. And it may be too beta to talk about, but I would love to hear about it.

John Greely: So Slickstories, is, essentially taking social media style story videos. So phone optimized, short content, right. And you can have either photos or videos. You’re familiar with stories, right? It’s a, it’s not a new concept, but a lot of these publishers will put huge amounts of time and effort into their stories and then have one avenue of distribution, which they can’t really use elsewhere.

Social media companies are incentivized to keep you within that ecosystem. [00:45:00] They don’t want you to embedding an Instagram story on, on a, website necessarily without it being in the Instagram ecosystem. But you own your intellectual property. You own the content that you create, as long as it doesn’t have any features that are specific to the, to the social media website itself.

So what the idea behind Slickstories is, is providing you a means to feature that content in new places, on your website itself and potentially that in the road monetize it.  You know, we’ve been in discussions with some ad networks about means that you could, that you could put ads within the stories that you’re putting on your site.

Right now we have a handful, I think maybe over a dozen now, sites that are using Slickstories, in, in itself and it’s test mode. And we have a, well, over a hundred on the, on the wait list at this point.  It’s exciting. And it’s another way to increase engagement on your site, but, and this is really important, we’re not going to roll it out unless we know that it helps. Like that’s the main thing is we’re not going to roll out a bunch of features that seem cool, but actually decrease engagement on your site because that would be a net [00:46:00] loss for everybody involved. Yeah. And it helps us understand the way that people are engaging with it. It helps us understand best practices for, for users creating that content. And for us, where to put it on the site. We’re still, we’re still in a learning stage with that, but we do have, we have a waitlist that we pull off a selectively based on sites that would be valuable for us to understand a little better.

Marly McMillen: I mean, my gut check just tells me it’s a great idea because  if you go through the trouble of doing a, how to, how to make cinnamon rolls in here are the five steps that I go through and you do that on Instagram stories, or something like that. And then it goes away in 24 hours, to be able to put that on that post? How great would that be?

John Greely: Yeah. It’s another example of where so much work in the blogging space, it’s just gone to waste. So much work that people are doing is not being used to its fullest potential. That amount that you did to create a handy walk by, you know, a walkthrough with a step by step guide to a recipe, or, you [00:47:00] know, even if it’s personal content about your, your vacation, that your, that your visitors are actually interested in, that shouldn’t be a onetime only, you know, send it and then leave it and then it’s gone forever. You should be able to get more value out of that. There has to be a way.

Marly McMillen: Right. Exactly. And I think, I think there’s some pressure on bloggers or we have a tendency to be a kind of perfectionist and it, and we’re rewarded for that. Like the better our photos, the more traffic we get, you know? So we’re rewarded for doing these top notch things. So, but to have some space on the site that is a little bit more like, you know, Instagram stories is a little bit more raw. It’s a little bit more, Hey, here’s how we really, maybe my kitchen isn’t perfect, but it’s, you know, you’re going to get to see how to make cinnamon rolls here. So I still like creating that space on your site is, is pretty exciting.

John Greely: It’s another example of where we’re trying to follow the tracks on the grass and decide where to lay the sidewalks. What we’ve heard from so many publishers is that my ad network wants me to do video. Right. It’s a great way to make money. A [00:48:00] lot of people are telling me video is the way to go, but video is so intimidating. It’s so intimidating. And if you get it wrong, then you’re not helping anybody. Right. So creating really high quality professionals style video, it’s difficult and it’s time consuming and not everybody’s going to want to do it. Bbut stories are casual. They’re easy. It’s a different sort of, mindset that it puts the visitor in.

Marly McMillen: Different vibe. Yes, I like it. Yeah. Okay. John, this has been great. I think it’s, I think we’ve given  a lot of people, some really good, food for thought on Slickstream and just the  engagement and trying to engage your audience in a real way. So I’m excited about that,  but I like to ask some fun questions at the end of the interview. Are you, are you game? Okay, well, these are food bloggers. So we got to talk about food just a little bit. Do you have a favorite food?

John Greely: Yeah. Mission style burritos. So that’s, that’s like that’s, that’s San Francisco specialty, right? So it’s the big, the big foil wrap burritos you get at a counter, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, they’re like two meals in one they’re always bigger than your face. [00:49:00] I, you know, I’m from the Bay, to me, burritos are the, are the perfect food.

Cause still like sandwiches. You can have them in a new variety. You can get enough, you can get enough diversity in your. And your burritos to have them for every meal and every day. And seriously, I have been accused of that before, but the mission ones are more specifically the San Francisco variant.

Marly McMillen: I don’t what, what is the mission word mean in all of that.

John Greely: I mean the San Francisco mission district is a, is a very,

Marly McMillen: I got it. Okay, great. So it’s really just a big burritos stuff with all the things and.

John Greely: It’s it’s. When you think about the burritos that are bigger than your face that are wrapped in foil, you know, that’s, that’s the mission burrito of San Francisco.

Marly McMillen: Oh, I love it. You feel like you’re getting your money’s worth out of it?

John Greely: Oh man. I’m hungry.

Marly McMillen: I’m sorry.

John Greely: OK. What’s the favorite

Marly McMillen: app on your phone?

John Greely: Favorite app probably right now it’s a Strava, the running or running, cycling, swimming. I’ve been, getting a chance to run a lot more regularly during, during quarantine, and I, you know, I love app.

[00:50:00] Marly McMillen: So your commute time is now you could spend it running.

John Greely: Right, right. Exactly.

Marly McMillen: And what what does it do to it? It keeps track of your runs.

John Greely: Yes, it’s a Strava is great. It’s it’s it tracks your, your GPS, your time, your pace, your elevation, et cetera. It’s nice and social. So I can give kudos to my friends who were running as well. And it’s a good means to have a little bit of accountability around your exercise, which is important right now.

Marly McMillen: Oh, it’s so true because it’s, you know, it’s so easy to have these goals, like, Oh, I’ve got a little bit more time. I can. And then the next thing, you know, it’s like, Oh, it’s five o’clock I haven’t done anything yet.

John Greely: Yeah, no, seriously. How does that happen?

I don’t even

Marly McMillen: know how that happens, have big goals. And I’m lucky that my husband is super routine focused and we’ve started doing yoga together. And so I, I’m the kind of a person that would say I would want to do yoga every day. And he’s the person that says when he’s going to do it, he does it. So we’re doing yoga every day. It’s pretty nice. Yeah, I enjoy it.

Okay. Do you have any time for TV or reading at all? And if you [00:51:00] do, what’s your favorite.

John Greely: I’ve been reading currently “A Gentleman in Moscow”, which was recommendation from my sister and I have absolutely loved it. I, you know, it’s, I’d like to make more time for reading, but I probably spend a little more time on TV these days. “Mrs. America” on Hulu has been sensational.

Uh, that’s the.

but I haven’t seen it as a good.

Oh, I mean, that’s, it’s so good.

Rose Byrne is Gloria Steinem is fantastic. Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. It’s it’s it’s it’s phenomenal. I really it’s. It’s entertaining enough that it’s both, you know, very historical it’s historical fiction, of course, but it’s, it’s it tows the line of educational and entertaining extremely well.

And it’s just superbly acted.

Marly McMillen: Oh, that’s cool. I can’t wait to check that out. I mean, we don’t have Hulu, but I’m sure there’s other ways eventually to watch it now, or is it only, you have to have Hulu to watch it?

John Greely: That’s the thing. It might be FX. Streaming has gotten too complicated.

Marly McMillen: It is so complicated. Like we [00:52:00] had Apple TV. And so now it’s like, it seems like all of these other shows that we watch are all on that app. And I’m so confused now. I don’t even know.

John Greely: Yeah,

Marly McMillen: Yeah. So, yeah, I’m going to check for that, because that sounds really good. I really want to watch that.

John Greely: Yeah, we’re I think it’s eight or nine episodes in now. So, we’re now actually caught up or watching a show once a week, which is, that’s new. That’s a thing I haven’t done in a long time, is being caught up with the show and having to wait a week.

Marly McMillen: It’s hard isn’t it. When you get used to just being able to watch it whenever you want,

John Greely: You know, it really is.

Marly McMillen: I’d almost rather wait till this series is over and then just watch it one, you know, one night, one, every one episode every night.

John Greely: Yup. Yup. That’s definitely. Oh, and I should, I should add in quarantine, we’ve been knocking off a long time bucket list for me, that my friends have made fun of me forever. Which is “The Wire.” We’re just on season four now. And I understand that season four is, is often [00:53:00] considered the best one, but it’s great.

Marly McMillen: Okay, cool. That’s another one I haven’t watched. So I should put that on my list too then.

Okay. So how can people find Slickstream online? What’s the best way to engage with Slickstream?

John Greely: Yeah, so Slickstream.com, you can go and check out, the engagement suite and Slickstories there. We also are on Twitter and Facebook, extreme HQ on both. and we, you know, if you want to email us, I’m john@Slickstream.com or info, citrin.com works to reach out to the team. But, you know, we try to be very responsive.

We try to respond to everybody who gets in touch with us

I love that John I’ve had a really good time talking with you. So thanks for joining me.