APIs are a technology that make it possible for software to talk to other software. Think of it like a user interface, but for machines instead of people.
By themselves, an API doesn’t do anything. APIs allow other software to use them to do something. To make use of an API, you need a developer to write code that talks to the API.
Some examples:
You could use the API to copy scores from Silktide into a separate dashboard platform.
A developer could ask the API for score results, and send that information to their own dashboard system on a regular basis (e.g. every 10 minutes).
Example using Google Data Studio
If you have a large number of websites that are defined outside of Silktide, you could use the API to tell Silktide what websites it should monitor. This would save you manual work synchronizing your list of websites with Silktide’s.
The details would depend on your process, but a developer would probably want to create websites, update them, and maybe even delete them.
You could ask Silktide for information and share some of it on Slack.
For example, a developer could ask Silktide’s API how well their analytics goals are going, and use that information to send alerts into Slack, e.g. a Monday morning update on how many conversions they have.
We have written the Silktide API documentation so that a non-technical person can understand much of what it can do, at a high level.