Parse.ly vs. smartocto

For people working in online media, or digital content creators, the platform could help them understand their audience and allow them to interact with them in a user-friendly way. Since the digital media industry is booming, Parse.ly can allow the user and the content creators to meet each other's demands and reduce redundancies and bombard the users with unnecessary content.

Incentivized

smartocto is very well suited to measuring blog performance, gaining insights into topics that resonate & measuring how well your content team is performing. It makes for a good, user-friendly alternative to GA4. It could do with better SEO tracking features as this is what most B2B content teams are focused on.

• Real-time metrics are great and help us decide what content to follow up on.
• Audience segmenting is key, helps us determine where we're strong and where we're not.
• Historical metrics are also helpful in helping us see what readers come back to overtime, which drives decisions about what content to devote more resources to producing.

Incentivized

• Providing actionable data the moment that you need it
• Providing a clear and easy to use UX
• Very flexible when it comes to the configuration for your particular business

• Traffic source. I would like to be able to find the exact social media page a view comes from. Now I can only tell which platform.
• I would like to be able to compare traffic more than one year ago. Now I'm limited to one year.
• Some more customization of reports (or maybe more training).

Incentivized

• CPI is sometimes harder to understand but once you do it is of great help for business strategy
• Video content analysis could be improved but it is sufficient enough.

Cost is always a factor when considering any renewal, so we will always see how that compares to other offerings, but we have been pleased with the functionality from Parse.ly. Importantly, it has engaged news teams, and writers can easily assess their own performance--it is not just a management tool. This wider take-up makes it more likely that we would renew.

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

smartocto is a very user-friendly tool, with a smart & clean interface.

Seems to be more bugs than I encounter in Google Analytics, but Parse.ly is always very quick to answer my questions or fix something. It seems like most of my issues are due to communications around my requests being outside of the package we pay for with this tool (i.e., only two years of data).

Incentivized

Parse.ly excels in providing detailed insights into how users are interacting with specific pieces of content, allowing us to make data-driven decisions about content strategy and optimization. Its real-time reporting also provides us with immediate feedback on the effectiveness of content changes, which is particularly important for content-heavy sites that need to iterate quickly.

Incentivized

Google Analytics is a general type analytics better suited for sales than media environment. It gives good overview data but it is hard to setup a system in a newsroom where you could make data driven decisions on future content. smartocto is editorial analytics suite and is easier to use in a newsroom.

• 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

• We have onboarded 70 old-school journalists to daily reporting and data retrospect. The a/b testing solution had proven that we have drastically improved our CTR.