Parse.ly – Insider Insights For Publishers

Publishers who are interested in maximizing their content to increase page views and incremental revenue can turn to Parse.ly for guidance. The analytics dashboard has been developed specifically for top publishers, offering insight into how top performing posts, topics, and writers can be tweaked for maximum reach.

When you use Parse.ly, publishing becomes less of an art and more of a science. Use raw data to increase page views and draw in readers who wouldn’t typically visit your site. Click over to the Parse.ly dashboard to see an overview of how your site is performing on any given day. Top posts can be broken down and filtered by topic, author, section, or referrer, allowing you to quickly see the number of page views for each post on a given day. Using the rankings tool, you can quickly compare authors based on the number of posts they’ve written or the number of page views those posts have received. You can also break down your posts or articles by topic, to discover which hot button issues are most likely to draw new readers to your website.

Not only can the analytical data generated by Parse.ly help editors decide which stories to assign to which writers, but it can also be used by sales teams and other marketers when selling space to outside advertisers. Parse.ly offers an API, which large publishers can use when building custom analytics tools into their content management systems, as well.

Practical Uses:

• Learn more about your website visitors
• Get insight into what topics your readers are interested in
• See which writers are generating the most page views
• Take a closer look at how your website traffic ebbs and flows over time

Insider Tips:

• Install Parse.ly by adding Javascript to your site’s footer
• View the most important stats about your sites in Parse.ly’s Weekly Digest
• Dashboard data can be exported at any time
• Parse.ly offers an API for publishers
• Data across multiple domains can be accessed from the Parse.ly dashboard

What we liked:

• Publishers who follow Parse.ly’s advice are guaranteed to increase page views
• Editors can use analytical data to decide which stories to assign to which writers
• Parse.ly shows which topics are trending at the fastest rates
• Publishers who use Parse.ly don’t have to rely as heavily on SEO to generate traffic

What we didn’t like:

• Parse.ly’s monthly plans are probably too expensive for small to medium size publishers

Alternatives:

• Chartbeat – http://chartbeat.com
• Clicky – http://clicky.com
• Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
• Mixpanel – http://mixpanel.com

Company Info:

• Launched: December 2009
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: New York, New York
• Founded by: Andrew Montalenti and Sachin Kamdar
• Web site: http://www.parsely.com

Costs:

• Track plan is $499 per month