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Parse.ly

Parse.ly

Overview

What is Parse.ly?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Great for comparison

7 out of 10
March 10, 2024
Parse.ly is used to track and analyse our website performance and data. The data is used to help identify trends, both live and over time, …
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Parse.ly is great

10 out of 10
February 22, 2022
Incentivized
I use it to analyze our site's traffic on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, to see what types of stories do well and what types of …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 8 features
  • Device and Browser Reporting (5)
    8.4
    84%
  • Pageview Tracking (5)
    8.1
    81%
  • Customizable Dashboards (6)
    7.7
    77%
  • Referral Source Tracking (6)
    7.6
    76%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.parse.ly/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $499 per month
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Features

Web Analytics

Web Analytic features such as SEO tracking, user engagement tracking, pageview tracking, and behavior analysis.

7.4
Avg 7.7
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Product Details

What is Parse.ly?

Parse.ly is an analytics platform built for content and designed with the belief that the most successful companies are the ones with the best content. Winning in the digital content world, though, isn't easy. You need to create feedback loops and listen, though data, to what your audience is telling you.

With 30 unique attention metrics, subscriber tracking, and audience segmentation, content creators, analysts, editors, marketers and communications professionals can use Parse.ly to:

  • Grow their business and improve key metrics like reader engagement, conversions, and retention through data-driven insights.

  • Act on immediate real-time audience insights or analyze historical data to get a clear picture of the past and plan for the future.

With a built-in personalization platform product teams can use Parse.ly to create dynamic content experiences powered by data and personalized by user on their website and in their CMS or WCM.

With our data pipeline platform data scientists and engineers can use our enriched clickstream data to spend less time on data infrastructure and more time on data analysis and insights.

Parse.ly works with 300+ enterprise companies using their trusted data infrastructure:

  • The #4 most widely installed premium web technology on high-traffic sites (according to BuiltWith).

  • Parse.ly is used by leading media and entertainment companies, DTC brands, Fortune 500 companies, B2B enterprise companies, and anyone who believes content can move their business forward.

Parse.ly Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview in full-screen mode: Many Parse.ly pages, like the Overview, are TV-ready. Keep your entire team up-to-date with live, full-screen dashboards on TVs in your office.Screenshot of Overview screen: See a snapshot of what your audience is paying attention to today so you can make fast decisions about what content to produce or distribute. Customize it to show only what your team cares about by filtering it to a particular author, section, or tag. You can pick what stats and listings are displayed.Screenshot of Real-time posts page: See what’s gathering steam so you can capitalize on attention to every post, campaign, or section.
Real-time data includes the last 24 hours and updates every five seconds. It can be seen, filtered, and sorted on most screens.Screenshot of Historical posts page: Explore historical trends by post, author, section, topic, referrer, or campaign. Compare today’s performance to last week, month, or year.Screenshot of Campaign tracking: Easily tie in your off-site promotion to engagement with your on-site content using UTM parameters.Screenshot of Multi-channel tracking: Track all your content in one place, no matter where it lives.
Compare how your content performances on various distributed channels including your website, AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News.Screenshot of Referrers: Understand where your readers are coming from and what’s trending where in real-time or historically.Screenshot of Reporting suite: Set up recurring reports and schedule them to be emailed to you or your team on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence.Screenshot of Tags: Tag content by format, topic, style—whatever structure makes sense for your company. Track sponsored content campaigns for better, more efficient, sales reporting.Screenshot of Conversions report: In the report, quickly see which content converts the most readers, which content assists the most conversions, and which types of conversions content drives best. The report runs weekly, showing conversion data for the last week.Screenshot of Video analytics: Demonstrate ROI of video efforts with a real-time and historical view of video performance. Parse.ly shows how videos and posts interact: which posts contain videos and which videos are played on each page.

Parse.ly Video

Visit https://parsely.wistia.com/medias/tbv33sc8sh to watch Parse.ly video.

Parse.ly Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Mobile Web

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Parse.ly starts at $499.

Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, and Google Analytics are common alternatives for Parse.ly.

Reviewers rate Reporting in real-time highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of Parse.ly are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(126)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 81)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 10, 2024

Great for comparison

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly is used to track and analyse our website performance and data. The data is used to help identify trends, both live and over time, which can be used to optimise our website. The software can also be used to generate reports, which for our organisation, is helpful to compare performance over time and across the organisation/individuals. Parse.ly is used across our organisation daily.
  • The ability to generate reports that allow individuals and the organisation to compare how articles have performed over time is really helpful. This also means that treads can be easily identified. The reports are also clear and easy to understand.
  • Parse.ly is user friendly and easy navigate, particularly when trying to establish the source of traffic to a particular article. It's also helpful that each source is coloured coded, making it easy to see at a glance where the traffic is coming from.
  • The graphs that show page views over time are helpful in establishing when is the best time for content to go live.
  • It would be good to be able to compare the current day with more than just the previous day on the 'Overview' layout.
  • It would also be helpful to drill down via the graphic to see which articles were trending at which times of day. This would be particularly useful out of traditional working hours.
Parse.ly is well suited to use in the newspaper/media industry, but it would be equally well suited to use in any sector that wanted to judge - and be able to analyse - traffic to its website.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We mainly use it to track our online content - which articles are being widely read, how many page views has our website had, etc.
  • Outlines the information clearly and concisely
  • Provides interesting feedback
  • Informative, easy to use and thorough
  • Maybe add a UK contact number
  • Maybe direct access to the different categories , eg What's On
  • Maybe a way of seeing exactly where viewers are coming from
I think it's ideal when it comes to finding out information about an article you've recently published, when you want to know how it's doing and how many people it's reaching worldwide. Maybe it's less appropriate when it comes to finding out more about the viewing of the different categories.
Mike Scialom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly means data about the entire group's online traffic is available pretty much instantly. I use the platform to analyse my own traffic, for instance I can see which stories are trending, for how long, and this helps me analyse my output, so for instance maybe some types of stories don't tend to do well, and others do. This doesn't necessarily influence my output - for instance in Cambridge, a business story may be relatively low in traffic terms, but it is a select audience I want to reach, so the volume doesn't matter in that situation. It helps that I can assess where the traffic is coming from, how it compares against my colleagues' output for that hour/day/week/month, and it has become a vital tool to finetune my output.
  • Traffic data
  • Comparison with other writers on the same paper
  • Up-to-the-minute analysis
  • Visual way of sharing data
  • Easy to use
Easy to use, detailed data
EJ Ward, MCIJ | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly across our digital platforms for assessing how our news stories are performing and how many visitors we are getting to our website. This means we are able to see when stories and articles are becoming popular and then we can make sure they feature higher on our website. We're also able to track where our traffic is coming from to enable us to inform how we put out content in the future and also work out what times are best. My favorite feature is being able to track comments made quoting and linking to pages on our website and finding out what people are saying on Twitter.
  • Parse.ly helps us monitor which stories on our website are doing well and helps us track where our traffic comes from.
  • Using Parse.ly means we can immediately see when a news story on our website is generating interest and react to that.
  • Parse.ly means we can track which website authors are achieving a high number of page clicks and then assess why that may be.
  • Parse.ly Makes it easy to show our staff, visitors and external stakeholders just how well we are doing
  • Parse.ly Had very good customer support for those times thing go wrong
  • I wish you were able to see the level of detail when it comes to FaceBook that you can see when it comes to Twitter.
  • I wish I could see multiple websites on one screen, maybe divide my screen into quarters or the like.
  • I wish the mobile app was easier to use.
  • I wish it was easier to search for authors
I find Parse.ly is very well suited for the news and media industry enabling us to track performance in a live environment and to see where a trend is developing and why. This means we can then react accordingly to this. It is not as good when trying to predict what articles will do well or monitoring how long someone spends on a particular page.
Alice Marshall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pare.ly across editorial and content development departments in order to monitor the performance of online articles and respond accordingly to traffic surges and drops. It's one of many tools we use to garner this kind of data and allows us to easily navigate the hundreds and thousands of articles published across the companies numerous websites. From offering top performing stories and those getting the most traffic in a more granular and of the moment tab 'in the last 10 minutes'. With its intuitive and friendly interface, Parse.ly allows us to dive into articles categorised by tags, as well as authors, and see not only traffic but where that traffic is being referred from e.g. Google, AMP, social networks. All of this gives a better indication of how to respond both to the performance of singular articles and on a wider scale. From updating articles that plummet, to reusing successful strategies in the future.
  • Intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
  • Home screen displays day's top performances as well as top performing articles in the last 10 minutes.
  • The ability to focus in on an article-by-article basis, as well as by tag/section/author etc.
  • Referral data could be more detailed and specific.
  • Better labeling in graph form/ability to zoom in to traffic spikes/drops.
  • Saving last searches.
For complete novices to the world of data analysis, Parse.ly offers a really friendly and easy to use interface that is easy to dive into and familiarize yourself with. It offers surface level insight into article performance, as well as the overall publication, allowing you to react to content that is under performing. There is certainly more detail that could be offered by Parse.ly for a really nuanced picture. However, there is power in simplicity and what Parse.ly offers.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly to keep track of the success of our newspaper website in terms of audience reach and dwell time. It is used daily by the editorial department but also to help our advertising teams discuss online digital advertising sales with clients. It guides our news team on content that is doing well in real-time, helping to inform decisions about what stories to cover in the future. It offers excellent insight into the online performance of both individuals and the title (and its sister publications). We can gauge how we are performing from day to day, week to week, and month to month, enabling us to set targets to help us achieve growth in our online audience. We monitor the sources by which people come to us--such as social media or a Google search--along with the times of day and the type of platform they are using. By setting up reports, we can swiftly inform all team members how we are faring and how their stories are doing, encouraging them to continue posting content that our audience appreciates.
  • Real-time audience measurement--Parse.ly helps us understand how many people are on our site now and how this compares to our usual performance. By ensuring we improve on standard performance, we can grow our numbers.
  • Reports--setting up automated reports that can be sent to team members enables us to inform them at a glance what stories have performed well. This keeps them engaged and encourages them to post content more likely to perform well.
  • Analysis of performances--everyone can access their statistics, encouraging them to improve their reach and dwell time of their stories and better understand what has done well.
  • Overview across time--it is easy to compare how you have performed over set periods (e.g., month-on-month or week-on-week), making it easy to set targets for growth.
  • 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.
Ideal for news teams who want to keep track of the success of their online audience and understand what stories perform well, where their audience is coming from, how sticky their content is, and how they are performing compared to normal achievements. It may be more difficult for ad managers to understand how specific ads are performing--although this is not my area of expertise.
Ross Perkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used entirely across the social aspects of Wireless to see in real time the page views of stories as well as historical data to plan ahead. It allows us to see what is doing well organically and identifies stories that are great to be shared to our partner sites to increase traffic. We also use Parse.ly to record data to provide feedback to editorial about what stories and features we should be writing about.

Its immediate recording of data is hugely beneficial to allow us to react as quickly as we can.
  • Real-time analysis
  • Identifying where traffic for tweets has come from
  • Able to break down referrers for each social platform
  • Ability to record UTM tracking codes
  • To see from which Facebook page a certain story has seen the most traffic
  • Breaking down where traffic has come from on Facebook by specific post.
  • Integrating images and recording its engagement
It’s well suited across any part of the organisation where you need to quickly find and see what stories are getting the most traffic. Being able to have categories where you can incorporate web traffic and SEO means we can effectively look ahead based on what trends and past performances have told us.

For Facebook, it would be beneficial to see what specific post has provided traffic, as sometimes other pages or people share the article which can distort how our own article has performed.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly to help with content optimization and audience engagement. We use the Engaged Time Measurement feature to track user engagement on articles, ensuring that the metrics we collect are accurate and relevant. By understanding which content is resonating with our audience, we can optimize our content creation and distribution strategies.
  • Accurate engagement metrics
  • User-friendly interface
  • Seamless integration with other tools
  • Customization options in e.g. reporting
  • User management, it's sometimes difficult to control user access to specific metrics/dashboards
  • Could be better at tracking engagement on social media
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Parse.ly every day at my job. It helps articulate in real-time the traffic on a website that needs to deliver information to its users as fast as possible. I monitor and use the software/website constantly throughout my entire day. I personally use it for a website that sees millions of users every month.
  • Delivers real-time feed of website traffic
  • Articulates data in a clear and concise manner
  • Makes user navigation incredibly easy to pick up with little knowledge or experience
  • It doesn't make it easy to examine data from more than 12 months prior
  • Its mobile experience could be better for those that might need it in a fast-paced environment
  • Sometimes articulates data visually, for a brief few moments, before it's actually in, and overestimates traffic
Parse.ly is particularly well suited to media companies that need quick real-time feedback from users who traffic their website and content. Any space where editorial decisions need to be made would benefit from using the software. It gives lots of information that helps you understand how many people are visiting your site and why in a quick and easily digestible manner.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pare.ly to analyze the real-time interaction with our website, portsmouth.co.uk - to see which stories are attracting the most attention, so we can then capitalize on that, and also to see where that traffic is coming from, ie, Facebook, Twitter, direct to our own site, etc.
  • Real-time analysis of how content is performing
  • Being able to compare various data sets, ie, days, individual users' content
  • Being able to compare performance over time
  • Make it easier to access old data
  • Is it possible to identify which individual Facebook pages traffic is coming from?
  • Improve the search facility - it sometimes brings up odd responses
Parse.ly is well suited to a media organization looking for a tool that can help you cut up and analyze your traffic in many ways. It is an effective tool for real-time analysis in the newsroom and to see how certain content or aspects of that content are performing over time.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Real-time traffic analytics for news stories across the site, selection of news, and hierarchy of reader engagement. Informs publishing patterns, story selection, and priorities. Some issues searching and locating stories, saving filtered searches, or modifying saved filtered searches and filtering by time isn't always that easy - can require a large number of clicks.
  • Real time data analytics of published stories
  • Filtering by time, sections, author, etc if fiddly/moving between pulse/historic, etc can be clunky and make searching difficult - UX/layout
  • Saving and editing saved filtered searches not intuitive
Watching live analytic insight is very useful and looking by day or month gives good snapshots of traffic and audience engagement. Looking at the audience's journey into and out of the story is not so good nor is seeing how video engagement is performing etc. Insight on pages and how people read is not there.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Parse.ly as a tool to identify the footfall of readers. The platform allows me to map the behavior of the readers on our platform and understand how and when readers react to stories. It also allows me to adapt to new things or take note of what sort of stories have a wider impact.
  • 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.
  • The interface could be more interactive and attractive.
  • The views tab could become active in the sense that when you hover the cursor it automatically tells you which days or period the article performed the best.
  • If the platform could also provide relative information on the kind of users reading the articles.
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.
February 22, 2022

Parse.ly is great

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use it to analyze our site's traffic on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, to see what types of stories do well and what types of topics are most resonating with our audience. What do they want to know more about? What are they not that interested in? Etc.
  • Traffic numbers
  • Comparisons
  • Organization
  • N/A
I just think it is so much more well-organized and user-friendly than Google Analytics.
January 13, 2022

Great for journalists

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly for real-time traffic monitoring and reporting.

It allows us to identify breakout search trends within our editorial content as we see articles climb or fall in the interface, and provides us an opportunity to create more relevant articles or to edit and update existing stories to make them meet user needs.
  • Historical Reporting.
  • Real time monitoring.
  • Ease of comprehension.
  • Identifying referrers/traffic sources.
  • More specific what referral tweet/FB post is.
  • Email alerts of relevant breakout topics.
  • SEO/keyword ranking advice.
It’s great for getting the whole office involved in “caring” about the traffic. The journalists love seeing their stories create a spike, and when something old spikes, it’s like a canary in a mine letting you know there is an opportunity to create something new that fulfills a user's need.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am a reporter for USA Today. We use Parse.ly to measure how well we are reaching our audience. This is imperative because our readers are not interested in knowing what is going on at the national level. They only want local news! So this program helps us evaluate which stories our readers enjoy the most. We use those stats as a source of motivation to find even more local content to produce.
  • shows daily, weekly and monthly stats
  • shows how long visitors read each page
  • shows how many readers read each story
  • N/A
  • N/A
  • N/A
N/A
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We monitor how people are viewing our news product by the day, hour, 10-minute segment, etc. Give us almost immediate data on what story is getting the most activity.
  • Shows story movement every few seconds.
  • Let's you check stats over both short and long periods of time.
  • It provides what we need. Hard to think of something it doesn't deliver.
It is perfectly suited for giving you eyeball movement of stories and how they are being consumed, via mobile, desktop, etc.
Mark Chiles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Parse.ly has become an integral analytics tool throughout our organization. It provides daily insight into how our content is performing, providing the editorial team direct feedback into how well our readership likes or dislikes the content being produced. We use it for daily reports across our content and conference websites, as well as a screen with a dashboard showing the daily information.
  • Provide insight into reader average time spent on content
  • Reporting around specific events
  • Dashboarding to have insight into multiple things at once
  • Being able to identify who the users are
  • Providing more details related to reader personas
  • Native Drupal module
Parse.ly has become an integral tool for our content operations. The Site Details report is emailed to the staff each morning to provide an overview of the site and performance from the previous day. We use this to analyze text-based, and video-based content, to determine what the next steps are for the editorial team.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly to track the number of page views our news stories and features receive on a daily basis. Parse.ly answers the question of what content works with our audiences, and what times of the day it is best to share it. It is also vital for knowing which channel different users opt to use to consume our content, for example, what is read most via search thanks to SEO.
  • Gives accurate real-time insights into how many people are reading a story - as well as which social channel they've used to find it and how the story compares to others [at] that moment.
  • Allows an author to keep an exhaustive bank of their stories along with the data behind them, making it easier to make informed choices on which content to create.
  • Uses data to place stories in a leaderboard-type format to show the best-performing articles from any given day, week, or month. This helps us create daily and round-up newsletters for our readers based on tried and tested content.
  • Page-view data could be more incisive. For example, a drop-down menu inside the Facebook tab which also indicates how many views have come from Facebook Stories, as well as conventional timeline posts.
  • With Facebook algorithms constantly changing, it would be useful if Parse.ly was able to liaise with social networks to send out best-practice notes to publishers. For example, which kinds of posts - and post reactions - will lead to content appearing on more people's timelines.
  • Expand the data set for page views in the 'Historical' tab beyond a year.
  • Integrate newsletter-tracking and subscription conversion data capabilities into the Parse.ly experience as standard.
Parse.ly is brilliant for understanding when spikes in page views happen in a day and what caused them. It is less useful for trying to understand which individual stories have led to subscriptions and conversions. We can of course look at which stories have driven the most traffic, but these are not always the ones [that] ultimately cause people to subscribe to us.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Global editorial strategy and planning for an enthusiast media brand, 25 FT employees. We use Parse.ly as our primary point for assessing the performance of our work, how readers are engaging with us, and which headlines are performing well for us, as well as who on our team is producing X no. of stories per period.
  • Author breakdown
  • Daily "pulse" monitoring
  • Traffic sources
  • The reporting system is complicated and somewhat confusing to set up, can't edit reports once they're created, have to create new ones
  • Identifying "smart" trends in stuff that is/isn't working - we have to do this analysis ourselves
  • Breaking down Google traffic sources (Discover is just categorized as "Google")
For daily/weekly/monthly performance tracking Parse.ly is a major step up for us from Google Analytics.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
iHeartMedia uses Parse.ly to track real-time web traffic analytics to radio station websites. Parse.ly is used exclusively by the digital content department to track content pages, on-air DJ blogs, and articles produced by the company. I personally use it to monitor real-time web traffic to track the performance of content posted by my team and provide analytics reports for the ten station websites in my market. Parse.ly is also used as an alternative to other analytics software we use like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics to pull website data more quickly than having to run a report on the two aforementioned products.
  • The interface is clean, easy to read, and informative
  • Pulling data is quicker than other analytics tools
  • Easy to filter data by different parameters and date ranges
  • There seem to be times in my experience when the metadata of a web page isn't pulled correctly, leading to some discrepancies between Parse.ly numbers and numbers considered "official" by my company.
  • Parse.ly does a great job of collecting data for individual articles on our web pages, but it is hard to use to get data for homepages and other landing-type pages. We end up using other analytics tools to collect this type of data.
  • The mobile experience doesn't show as much data on the Site Overview dashboard as it used to.
Parse.ly is great for tracking real-time web page traffic, especially for companies that produce a lot of blog/article content. It's easy to track how much traffic is currently coming to a web domain and the sources of the traffic. Google Analytics provides similar data but in a less user-friendly manner. Pre-COVID, we used to display the Site Overview dashboard on a TV in a common office area because staff enjoyed watching how their content was doing in real-time. Despite its ease of use, my organization relies on data from Adobe Analytics as "official" data.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly for content analytics, recommendation, trending now, curation, and generating more traffic on [the] entire site. It gives [a] good recommendation on trending now content based on end-user interest. Their best product [is] pages viewed, age time user on the page, visitors on the site, visitor on the site for x time, how many social interactions by the user, how many [users] read the posts.
  • Page viewed
  • Visitors on the site
  • [Average] time visitors [are] on the page
  • Social interactions
  • New posts read by users
  • Overall current traffic on the site
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboard
Well: Their technical implementation is very strong, and [the] team knows what their business function is. This product is best for analytics on-site to get to know how many users viewed pages, for how long, which pages are most viewed, how many users visited the site again, which page is generating more traffic on the site, and users like that content.

Less: Should add [a] defensive check on API, so when it is down, it should have some fallback.
Jonathan Miltimore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Parse.ly to track our website traffic to learn more about how people find our website and track their customer journey. Parse.ly provides more detailed, precise, and accurate information than Google Analytics and similar sites. It's used mostly by our editorial department but also by the entire company, including leadership, who like to see how widely our articles are being read, which ones people are reading, and how long people stay on the site.
  • Parse.ly has a much sleeker layout than its competitors. Very well designed.
  • Parse.ly is easy to navigate, which makes it easier to dig into the data to learn more about its uses: where they came from, how they found you, and how long they stayed.
  • Parse.ly has good customer service. They are proactive about helping customers utilize their tools.
  • Tracking users by age demographic is something I'd like to see Parse.ly incorporate. (This is one area where Google has an advantage over Parse.ly).
  • Parse.ly's app is not available to Android users. I don't like this because I have an Android.
  • Tracking page views through third-party publishers (using HTML code) is something Parse.ly can't do for some reason. Our tech people were able to do this easily with Google Analytics, but for some reason (beyond my knowledge), we can't do it with Parse.ly.
I like Parse.ly a lot (8 out of 10). It's really easy to use and visually impressive (visually, it is like going from E-trade to Robinhood). I'm in Parse.ly all day long, so it matters a lot that it looks good, is easy to use, and is largely intuitive to use (though I don't claim to know how to use every bell or whistle). So for media, it's a great tool. I imagine it would be for marketing and things of that nature, but I can't say for sure because I haven't used it for those purposes. Overall, it's an impressive product.
Iris Hong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used across the whole organization. We use it to track the readership of our content--financial news articles and analysis pieces. The data helps us understand the performance of our content.
  • It's very intuitive to navigate and view data by posts, authors, and sections
  • Data is provided in real-time
  • I'm interested in learning more about the visitors, such as the proportion of new visitors vs. old visitors, gender distribution, geographic distribution, occupation information, etc.
  • I can only view data from the last seven months. I hope to be able to view all historical data.
  • I'd like more insight on how people find our articles (e.g., if they get to us through Google search, what keywords they use on Google).
Parse.ly is very suitable for tracking the performance of blog posts or articles. It's probably not very appropriate for tracking the page flows or sales conversion (whether a viewer makes a purchase and becomes a buyer) of an e-commerce site.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Parse.ly daily! Multiple times a day--I always have a tab open. We use it as our main tool to see how our editorial is performing. It is the easiest way for us to look at time spent on articles and parse our content by site sections and tags. This is used heavily by audience development, social, and the editorial analysts.
  • Easily group content by tag
  • Easily group content by site section
  • Accurately count time spent on articles
  • Get a general understanding of where traffic is coming from
  • I would love to see YTD functionality as a default date setting where you can choose this week, last month, etc.
  • If a tag is added after you publish, Parse.ly only counts the traffic after it was added
  • Buggy right now--if I click on a post and then adjust the date, it still reflects the metric from the original date set
Measuring time spent, grouping content by site sections and/or tags. If we are really trying to see where traffic is coming from, it is harder to get more granular on Parse.ly. I am also sometimes looking at specific parts of the site that aren't content and there is no way for me to look at these custom elements.
August 10, 2021

Parse.ly just clicks!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used to gauge what stories are resonating with readers and calculate concurrent views, which translates to clicks aka eyes on stories. These numbers allow us to see what articles do well, what we can do more of, and which articles fall flat. Clicks also generate business for the company, a media outlet.
  • Real-time reporting
  • Easy to use
  • Reliable
  • Always being refreshed
  • Sometimes the format changes so you don’t see the top 20 stories, only say 8 or 10
  • Sometimes the history feature is glitchy
  • It doesn’t remember you so you always need to click on what you need
It is a colorful, engaging site, which is easy to use. I also appreciate the header at the top to know if it is a slow day or an exceptional day traffic-wise. It gives you an immediate heads up. It also easily lists the top authors for the day. Would highly recommend.
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