Parse.ly vs. Simply Measured (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

When we we're determining what's important to us we think budget, are we stuck in a contract; can it grow with our needs without hurting our pockets; can it solve our needs because we're such a large company that we almost need several solutions in one. Reporting - am I able to provide management the details they need to know to prove ROI? Also can we prove that demand generation efforts lead to closed deals?

Incentivized

• Firstly, the platform is super easy to use, it is user-friendly and easy to navigate through.
• Secondly, the platform also provides you the option to use filters to your best fit and adjust the filters according to what data you want to look at.
• Thirdly, it enables the user to have live feedback on their articles and see what can be improved going forward to address the need of the readers.

Incentivized

• Customer service analysis has been extremely useful for determining sentiment and adding context to real time crisis situations.
• Convenience of pulling data for all social channels at one time is extremely effective in making decisions in real time and to compare against other channel performance. The cross channel export minimizes a great deal of time for exporting data. Nearly all social channel data is available.
• Reports are extremely user friendly, visual and easy to export. Also the ability to see the raw data and to have it for historical reference is great.
• Key insights generated in the dashboard page help add fast context for performance.

Incentivized

• A more readily understandable visual guide to a visitor's pathway through your site would help understand what keeps a reader on-site.
• The total page view number for the day should be more readily visible--on the overview page, not just by going to Posts>Historical.
• Maintain the archive for longer than a year under all plans--it's a shame to lose year-on-year data quickly.

Incentivized

• While it incorporates MOST platforms not all of them, I believe Pinterest was still in trial. They will need to keep up to date as new platforms emerge.
• Not a super user friendly interface. I found it to be a bit clunky and dated looking.
• While their training was good, and they had good support resources, I think they good do more with marketing and education to help my team uncover more value from the software.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

For my current client, it's not right - they would not be actionable with the data to really need this tool. For my past clients, I would suggest they stay on it and i think they would agree.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The interface is very simple and organized around the core elements of the platform : the reports.

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.

Incentivized

Extremely fast response and they go above and beyond without asking. The support team has provided me data beyond our limit before and it was not an issue and not an extra cost, really good business support.

Incentivized

Very good implementation.

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.

Incentivized

Simply Measured has more in-depth reports than other tools in this category. Other tools may feature a lower price and are easier to learn. Others focus on only one channel, let's say Twitter. Simply Measured is comprehensive, extensive and has the depth to match. It's one of the few tools that can measure the impact of an individual message as opposed to the account in aggregate.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency of reporting. Although I still keep my own spreadsheets and create a few charts and graphs, Simply Measured's reports have saved me countless hours.
• Greater Visibility: Simply Measured's reports have helped increase the visibility of what the social media team is doing. What executive doesn't like a smart report?