Parse.ly has three core products that help your business create more engaging, content-driven experiences with data. 

These products are:

1. Analytics Dashboard: The accessible dashboard that everyone on your team can use to understand content performance.
2. Content API: The dual-purpose API you use to plug into your sites to serve recommended content personalized to your audience, and to send aggregated data from Parse.ly to your internal systems.
3. Data Pipeline: The pipeline you use to send raw, event-level data from your website and apps to your data warehouse.

Each product serves a different user—whether it’s an editor, marketer, journalist, audience growth specialist, or data scientist. Read more to find out which product is the right fit for you. 

The Parse.ly Dashboard

The Parse.ly Dashboard is a content analytics tool that helps teams track and analyze their website traffic, audience engagement, and content conversions.

How it works

The dashboard collects data from various sources such as web pages, social media platforms, and mobile apps, and presents it in a user-friendly interface that provides real-time insights, historical data, and actionable recommendations. 

This information is pulled by advanced algorithms to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in the data, and then generated into real-time reports and dashboards that can be used for decision-making.

Why teams love it

Make data easy

Gone are the days of hours-long custom report building in Google Analytics. Parse.ly’s intuitive dashboard presents content performance insights in ways that writers, marketers, and executives understand.

People like it because they know they need to be more data-driven—but it’s difficult to use most analytics tools. 

Parse.ly displays the data in the same way authors, editors, marketers, and executives think about content: Who wrote it? What is it about? Where was it published and distributed? What kind of attention did it get? Where did that attention come from?

Because Parse.ly meets people where they work and how they work, it’s much easier for them to become data-driven quickly.

“Data-phobia is a real problem for a lot of teams—most analytics platforms are not made for writers. Parse.ly is the tool that makes it fun, simple, easy, and not scary to get data. You want to start using it on a daily basis.”

—David Grossman, CMO, Backstage

Learn how Parse.ly helped increase Backstage’s content marketing ROI by 25%.

Focus content strategy

Instead of optimizing content for high-click, low-value audiences, Parse.ly users can track a wide range of metrics like pageviews, unique visitors, engagement time, and social media referrals. 

Other prominent dashboard features include:

• Video analytics
• Omnichannel tracking
• Multi-year data retention
• Audience segmentation
• Custom and Smart tags (use these to measure AI-assisted content!)

The dashboard tells you which content is performing best, allowing publishers to optimize their content strategy and increase audience engagement. 

Prove content ROI

The Parse.ly dashboard makes it easy to prove the ROI of content to the business, so you can build a predictable revenue engine. Our powerful Content Conversion engine offers a broad range of pre-built conversion types—such as newsletter signups, purchases, and referral links—or you can create custom events. 

We also offer multiple attribution models to track conversions based on the method—first touch, last touch, or linear—that makes the most sense for your goals.

Real-time data

One of the key features of the Parse.ly dashboard is its real-time data capabilities, which allow publishers to track their website traffic and engagement within minutes of posting. This feature is especially useful for breaking news stories or other time-sensitive content where publishers need to respond quickly to changing audience behavior.

With frequent updates and feature releases, we’re constantly adding new workflows to Parse.ly to make your data-driven decisions even faster and easier.

The Parse.ly API

The Parse.ly API is a powerful tool that serves two purposes: serving content recommendations on your website, and sending aggregated content performance data from Parse.ly to your own systems.

We designed the API to be highly scalable, handling millions of data points per second. Using these data points, the API integrates content recommendations into websites, apps, newsletters, and more. It also makes it an ideal solution for media companies and publishers who need to aggregate large amounts of data from multiple sources.

How it works

The Parse.ly API allows developers to make HTTP requests to the Parse.ly server using standard RESTful APIs. Data can be retrieved in a variety of formats, including JSON, CSV, and XML, and customized to suit the needs of the user. The API provides a range of endpoints, including accessing raw data, audience segments, and content recommendations.

Content recommendations

The most popular use of the API is recommending content to users to boost site engagement and recirculation rates.

Its customizable interface retrieves data on website traffic, content performance, audience engagement, and other metrics you deem important so you can serve similar content back to site users and keep them engaged in your content.

“We’ve seen an increase in fan interaction since we launched Parse.ly’s content personalization. It’s allowed us to build a widget that gives our visitors a glimpse into what content is truly trending amongst the fanbase.”

—Sam Flood, Manager of Digital Innovation, NBA Minnesota Timberwolves

Custom data exports

One of the key benefits of using the Parse.ly API is flexibility. Developers can use the API to build custom dashboards, integrate data into other platforms, and develop machine-learning models to analyze user behavior and engagement. 

This data can be integrated into other platforms to create custom audience segments based on various criteria, such as location, device type, and content consumption habits.

The Parse.ly Data Pipeline

Need a little more flexibility with your data than the API provides? That’s where the Data Pipeline comes in.

Parse.ly’s Data Pipeline (DPL) is a data infrastructure that collects raw event-level data and securely stores it until you’re ready to export that data to your visualization tool of choice. The DPL is especially helpful for real-time data analysis.

How it works

The Parse.ly DPL collects raw data from various sources, including web servers, mobile apps, social media, and other streams. The data is then transformed into a standardized format for later analysis. 

One of the key features of the Parse.ly Data Pipeline is its ability to handle large volumes of data quickly. The platform can process millions of data points per second and scale up or down depending on user needs. It also provides a flexible data model that allows users to define their own metrics and dimensions.

“Parse.ly provided us with the actual ability to pursue analyses beyond dashboard aggregations.”

—Haile Owusu, Chief Data Scientist, Mashable

Why it’s beneficial

#1. It works with a variety of tools.

The data formats we developed are especially easy to use with Python, R, Spark, Redshift, BigQuery, you name it. We also have standard integration schemas and recipes so that data can be used in ad-hoc querying and dashboarding tools, such as Looker, Periscope, and Tableau.

#2. You own the data gathered by the DPL.

The pipeline delivers 100% of your raw, unsampled data. You get a stream of every event from your users, sites, and apps. Data is delivered fast with end-to-end delivery times measured in seconds. You also get an elastic data store for full historical retention, grouped in 15-minute chunks of compressed JSON data. It’s neatly organized and can be accessed for weeks, months, or years. There are no rollups. Every single event is captured, then stored securely and durably.

#3. Any team can use it.

Multiple teams including Business Intelligence teams, SQL experts, data scientists, data engineers, and product teams can all use the Parse.ly Data Pipeline to gather insights.

Parse.ly and WordPress VIP

Open source CMS platforms like WordPress VIP have helped “democratize publishing,” putting easy-to-use content creation tools like the WordPress Block Editor in the hands of everybody. Parse.ly does the same—democratizing analytics across the organization.

Now that Parse.ly and WordPress VIP are part of the same family, the two work even better together when you use the Parse.ly WordPress plugin.

Want to see these tools in action, but not quite sure if they’re the right fit for your business? Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.