HitLinks is an inexpensive web analytics tools providing page view and unique visitor data to smaller site. Customers tend to be media sites with fairly simple analytics needs. The tools requires that some code be appended to all pages to be tracked, and does not offer any social media tracking.
$20
per month
Parse.ly
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Parse.ly is a content optimization platform for online publishers. It provides in-depth analytics and helps maximize the performance of the digital content. It features a dashboard geared for editorial and business staff and an API that can be used by a product team to create personalized or contextual experiences on a website.
If you're looking for a comprehensive, user-friendly web analytics tool, you should definitely consider Hitslink. Before you subscribe to the software, take a test run on their Demo version of the site, as it behaves exactly like the full professional version. The biggest disadvantage is that Google+ registered users' search engine traffic data will be mostly (if not completely) blocked. However, this drawback is rarely a significant hindrance to analyzing your website's traffic, but it is something to be aware of.
Parse.ly is a great tool for publishers who want to track engagement and audience behaviour across websites. With Parse.ly, we can easily track metrics like pageviews, time spent on page, and scroll depth to see which content is resonating with our audience and optimize our content strategy accordingly. Our marketers found Parse.ly to be an excellent tool for tracking the effectiveness of our campaigns. We can use Parse.ly to track metrics like referral sources, conversion rates, and engagement by audience segment to see which channels and tactics are driving the most engagement and conversions.
Specific information such as search term and geographic location is blocked for users coming into your site through Google who are also signed into a Google+ account, making it increasingly more difficult to analyze trends as more and more people acquire Google+ accounts. This is part of Google's strategy to make companies pay them directly through their Google Analytics software, and it is working against services like Hitslink.
Hitslink is as useful as it is user-friendly. I haven't seen another website analytics tool as comprehensive and at the same time straightforward as this service. The only downside of Hitslink is Google's blocking of information from its registered Google+ users to the software. As Google+ continues to reign in more of the population, I can see this being a significant problem for Hitslink to overcome. However, there is still a vast majority of search engine users whose actions are visible through Hitslink, and as long as this stays the case, the service will be an invaluable tool for website administrators.
As an employee, this is difficult for me to comment as I am not directly funding or making these business decisions. However, it is a tool many get on with for surface level data that is useful to editorial teams.
The service is incredibly intuitive and very easy to learn. The only drawback is not having a mobile-optimized website to easily view website reports on the go. But on a PC or Mac, Hitslink is as user friendly as it gets. I have yet to see a navigation system on any SaaS website that makes a service that is this comprehensive seem so straight-forward.
The Parse.ly platform is very user-friendly and easy to use. User management is simple, and reporting setup only takes a few minutes. They provide very helpful documentation for implementing the scripts on your site and have great customer support to help with custom development such as implementing their content recommendation engine.
I rate this question this way solely because I haven't requested any support. I feel where I will eventually get support would be when we take Parse.ly up on some training that is being offered. We are looking to do that at some point after the first of the year and when our schedules support it.
Parse.ly does pretty well compared to Chartbeat, particularly when it comes to historical information and analysis options that are easy for employees to use after some short training. The onboarding for Parse.ly is intuitive, and the scheduled reports take away basically all of the inconvenience associated with regular metrics reviewing. But Chartbeat wins in its social audience tracking because it can source traffic to a specific social post, which can show you exactly how your audience is coming to your content and where you need to put your content to be sure you get that audience.
Sometimes in meetings our editorial director will point out stories that didn't perform well. To us, that means readers don't really care about the topic, so we'll pivot away from writing about that in the future. That might not be "business objectives" though.
