Item: Parse.ly
Rating: 9
Author: Ross Perkins

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Sets page targets
Identifies what pages drive most traffic
Allows us to see what types of stories perform well to follow and continue trends
Planning on evergreen content for repeated use

Alternatives Considered

Meta gives a detailed breakdown of page interactions and reactions as well as link clicks. It’s more comprehensive than Parse.ly if you download its data but it's also fiddly and a lot of the data is not needed. Plus, it’s hard to distinguish how much traffic has come from image posts, as it can’t give an accurate answer. Parse.ly simplifies data and makes it much easier to assess what stories have done well, as well as giving the actual title of the stories, not just URLs.

Usability

It is really simple to set up and use and for social media, can instantly give you results as to how well posts are performing. There is a lot of Parse.ly still to understand in other areas, and a lot of features I’ve still untested, but its convenience and ability to track UTM codes gives me a lot more data to understand and refer back to.

Likelihood to Renew

It does exactly what we need it to, it helps record data and let us interpret it to help shape our goals. Its historical function is brilliant to look back and see what stories of the past week have done well, plus its tagging record to see under specific categories what stories have been high performers.

Key Insights

Do you think Parse.ly delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Parse.ly's feature set?

Yes

Did Parse.ly live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Parse.ly go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Parse.ly again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Echobox Social, Meta Business Manager

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Support Rating

On the whole it is great in terms of its function and use. There are times it crashes and it takes a while for it to be up and running again, which when identifying the best stories to share makes it difficult. But largely any crashes are quickly resolved and data isn’t affected.

Passing judgement on Parse.ly

Overall Satisfaction with Parse.ly