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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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Learn from top reviewers

Parse.ly Review from a User.

Rating: 9 out of 10
August 12, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Yes, we use it for page analytics tracking. It helps us get real-time data on page/article performance.
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Fahad Zafar
Engineer - Engineering
Director Software Engneering
WBD
Parse.ly15 years of experience

Parse.ly is time saver

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 5, 2024
Vetted ReviewVerified 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 stor...
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Mike Scialom
Employee - Social Media
Business correspondent
Cambridge Independent
Parse.ly3 years of experience

Parse.ly tells me what's popular and where it's popular

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 1, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 s...
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EJ Ward, MCIJ
Manager - Social Media
Senior Editor
Global Radio - LBC
Parse.ly3 years of experience

Intuitive and clean software

Rating: 7 out of 10
February 29, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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....
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Alice Marshall
Employee - Marketing
eCommerce Staff Writer
Future Plc
Parse.ly2 years of experience

Passing judgement on Parse.ly

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 27, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 w...
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Ross Perkins
Employee - Social Media
Sport social media manager - The Sun
News UK
Parse.ly3 years of experience
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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.

7.5
Avg 8.1
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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 Integrations

Parse.ly Competitors

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 8.6.

The most common users of Parse.ly are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

View all reviews
(1-5 of 32)

Parse.ly works great for media orgs

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
November 15, 2021
Verified User
Team Lead in Other
Media Production Company, 1001-5000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • Author breakdown
  • Daily "pulse" monitoring
  • Traffic sources
Cons
  • 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")
Likelihood to Recommend
For daily/weekly/monthly performance tracking Parse.ly is a major step up for us from Google Analytics.

Parse.ly helps understand audiences, but social tracking is lacking

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
March 20, 2021
AC
Andrew Capps
Reporter
Gannett (Newspapers, 10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Parse.ly to monitor website metrics for our news departments. It helps us track how well our content is doing with our audience and where that audience is coming, plus when they most want to see new content and when they make time to read more content, which drives our publishing decisions and our content strategy.
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • Needs better social tracking, what post/group is generating traffic rather than just which platform.
  • Scheduled email reports could provide more context, similar to what's available on a site's landing page.
  • The overlay function is very limited and even more temperamental, not a valuable tool.
Likelihood to Recommend
Parse.ly is great for real-time metrics and for analyzing audience interaction over time. It does a great job in showing you what people are engaging within the moment and how they've engaged with it in the past and does a fair job of showing where that engagement comes from in terms of search/social/internal audiences. It is not great at pinpointing the origin of social audiences, which is needed for getting content in front of the right viewers. It's also not particularly suited to market analysis. Your site's metrics are offered without any context for what's happening online in your area.

Meaningful data that I can present to others - reliability at the push of a button

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
March 29, 2021
Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Public Relations & Communications Company, 1-10 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Parse.ly is being used across the whole organization. It is used on a weekly basis to track content performance and the bookmarklet tools is used regularly to check the performance of specific articles. It addresses the issues of content monitoring, and provides more data than Google Analytics in terms of engaged minutes and social media referrals with accuracy.
Pros
  • Easy to segment dashboards based on search terms and over periods of time.
  • The ability to click on particular features of the dashboard (eg referrals) to drill down to more data.
  • The bookmarklet tool is ideal for quick access to specific pieces.
Cons
  • Being able to download the graphs from the dashboard rather than just exporting raw data to a CSV file.
  • Being able to sort search results by date published.
  • Including LinkedIn stats as part of the main dashboard report.
Likelihood to Recommend
Parse.ly is particularly useful for content management reporting, particularly on specific segments or categories. The dashboards are clear and intuitive to use, and the ability to drill down to more information is fantastic. I also appreciate the way Parse.ly provides regular updates for users along with calls with account managers.

Powerful Parse.ly

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
November 23, 2019
Verified User
Employee in Other
Newspapers Company, 201-500 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is used across the whole organization. We use it to monitor traffic on our stories. It answers questions like how many people are reading them, if they've found the story from Facebook or another site, and how long they spend in the story and the story they click on afterward. We also are able to find out what stories interest our readers and what don't.
Pros
  • Showing if they found our story from social media platforms or from going to our site directly gives us an idea of the kind of reach we have across social media.
  • Seeing the "dwell time" gives us an idea of why readers spend longer in stories than others, is there a video? interesting pictures? an informational graphic?
  • I think seeing what story readers click on next helps to see what interests them and if they care about a particular topic or not.
Cons
  • I would like to see where in the world our readers come from - Right now it's not too specific.
  • I would like to see what stories they were reading before they got to the one in question - Right now it isn't too specific.
  • I would like to see the traffic for individuals to be included in stories that are shared bylines.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it is best suited in media so that news organizations can see how stories perform on their sites. I am not sure where it would not be suited in my industry.

A reliable and useful platform, with some room to improve.

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
January 13, 2020
Verified User
Employee in Other
Newspapers Company, 1-10 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Parse.ly
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My company uses Parse.ly in its newsrooms to track daily and longterm engagement by our readers, which can influence the type of story we cover or the amount of coverage we pursue.
Pros
  • Frankly, it does the simple task that it's supposed to do: track the number of people who visit a story and the average time they spent on said story, giving me a breakdown over the last several minutes, the last 24 hours, or a historical period of time.
  • It offers an idea of whether readership is on par for any given day of the week, or whether engagement is below or exceeding the average readership for that day of the week.
Cons
  • Before my current newsroom switched to Parse.ly, I used another another platform (its largest competitor), and there were things I miss from that platform. This may be more perception than reality. But with the other platform, I felt like I was getting more real-time, live data. I felt like I could see the number of people who were currently, at that very moment, on the page. While using Parse.ly, I feel like I'm seeing a count of people who visit the page over a set period of time.
  • Retention is also very important to me. When looking at the dashboard on a different platform, I could see not only how many people were on the page at any given time, but also how long they were staying on average. Again, this information felt like it was being offered in real time, and it was right on the dashboard. With Parse.ly, it seems I have to click on the actual article to get that information.
Likelihood to Recommend
Despite the notes I made under the "Cons" section of this review, I see no reason to avoid Parse.ly if your goal is to track website analytics. It does the job and I've not had any glaring problems. If you're hoping to dip deeper than just numbers, that could be a problem. For example, I like to find out who is sharing my articles on social media, where the articles are being posted, and how much traction those social media posts are getting. Such a task is more suited for a browser extension like CrowdTangle than the Parse.ly tool.

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