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Parse.ly helps understand audiences, but social tracking is lacking
March 20, 2021

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

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

Overall Satisfaction with Parse.ly

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Great indicator of what content does well and what does not.
  • Allows us to prioritize more successful content for greater resources.
  • Can sometimes push metrics into greater focus than other organization goals.
Parse.ly does pretty well compared to Chartbeat, particularly when it comes to historical information and analysis options that are easy for employees to use after some short training. The onboarding for Parse.ly is intuitive, and the scheduled reports take away basically all of the inconvenience associated with regular metrics reviewing. But Chartbeat wins in its social audience tracking because it can source traffic to a specific social post, which can show you exactly how your audience is coming to your content and where you need to put your content to be sure you get that audience.

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

Not sure

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

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.