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.
$499
per month
Unmetric (discontinued)
Score 7.8 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Unmetric was a SaaS platform for intelligence on an organization's social media efforts and the efforts of their competitors on social media. It provided data across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Its capabilities are now supplied by Brandwatch.
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.
Unmetric is great when you need to do quantitative analysis of social media posts, whether you own the posts or not. Newer features like segment creation where you can get results by keyword or category are amazing time-savers for certain tasks (like if you're looking at posts about fruit and want to see how posts that mention "bananas" perform you can do that right in the dashboard). Hopefully, they'll soon allow you to build and save those filters so you don't have to recreate them every time you do a task. While in the past I'd only recommend this platform for keeping a pulse on unowned content, the new tools make the platform useful even for reviewing owned content, as you may be able to save time on content coding tasks- it seems like that's the direction they're headed anyway
The interface is slightly different for each social channel, which is confusing for novice users. I wish they'd standardize their naming schemes and dashboards, to the extent they can be with the different platforms.
They'll add and implement new features but won't tell you- I came back into the platform to discover they'd applied a weighting scheme to my engagement rate that messed up my findings.
Sometimes the platform just stops working.
Support sits in India so there's no way to get answers fast if you have a question or issue.
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 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.
I haven't used Simply Measured in a few years, mostly because it was just too expensive for what we needed it for and Unmetric provided what we needed at a reasonable price. I also had an issue with how big the Simply Measured files were- they often froze analysts' computers, and the first task was to delete unused tabs to reduce the file size.
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.
