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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

(127)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 81)
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March 10, 2024

Great for comparison

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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
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.
EJ Ward, MCIJ | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
January 13, 2022

Great for journalists

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Mark Chiles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
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
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
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 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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