Great tool for editorial teams looking to understand their content
February 22, 2020

Great tool for editorial teams looking to understand their content

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Parse.ly

Our editorial team uses Parse.ly to gauge the success of our content—traffic patterns, engagement, how it's traveling off-platform, etc. We also use it to determine when stories might be "popping" across the Medium platform that we may want to repromote or amplify (a custom program on our platform). We also use the "referrals" section to identify possible new partnerships/aggregation opportunities for our publications.
  • Detailed Referral Sources: You can see exactly what websites are converting, and in some cases can get really granular to see what pages on the sites are converting (especially useful to see what Twitter users are talking about your content to see how it's resonating and identify influencers)
  • Great Real-Time Metrics: Can quickly see how a post is performing and make changes to framing if needed; can see if it's working as intended on the platforms it's optimized for.
  • Reporting functions are pretty basic. It would be great to see Parse.ly build out more custom options for reporting that get a bit more advanced for users that are more comfortable with data manipulation.
  • Right now you can't adjust dashboards to show a weekly or monthly trend view—this is necessary and a pain point for us as we try to identify trends.
  • Has helped our editors adjust content strategy to better serve audience.
  • Has helped us identify UGC content we want to bring into our platform.
Parse.ly was already used at my company when I started, we stayed because they'd done a lot of work on their end to make sure that our site's architecture was properly read in our system. We appreciated the work they put into making the system work for us. I did miss the "heatmap" provided by Chartbeat which showed us exactly how people were behaving on-page but otherwise found Parse.ly very competitive with those platforms.
The Support team is always quick to respond—even if they don't have an immediate solution. They're able to work well with our engineering team to resolve issues and always circle back to make sure that the problem isn't persisting. They've done a lot of custom work for us to make sure we can properly and strategically use the platform.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Parse.ly go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Parse.ly again?

Yes

If you have an editorial team that needs to be on the pulse of how content is performing, Parse.ly is a great, user-friendly tool that can be easily shared across the company. Also, they have a strong customer service team that can answer questions and solve bugs/issues relatively quickly. Really good at painting a picture of your external traffic and how content is performing and spreading across the web. I have not found it as useful for fully understanding internal traffic and some of the campaign tracking is a little cumbersome.