Parse.ly

Parse.ly is content analytics software for publishers and content teams, built around the argument that other analytics tools report what already happened as pageviews, sessions and static reports, while Parse.ly shows what audiences are doing now.

That distinction is more substantive than positioning language usually is. General web analytics was built to measure conversion funnels on commerce sites, where the question is whether a visitor completed a purchase. Content organisations have a different question entirely: which stories are gaining attention, which are fading, and what should be promoted on the homepage in the next twenty minutes. A tool answering that has to be real-time and organised around content rather than around sessions, because an editor cannot act on a report describing yesterday.

The Parse.ly Content Conversion Engine addresses the harder half of the problem, which is proving content's value. Content marketing has always struggled to attribute revenue because the path from reading an article to becoming a customer is long and indirect, and pageviews are a poor proxy that content teams are nonetheless judged on.

The Parse.ly platform covers a content analytics dashboard for strategy, the conversion engine for value attribution, a content API for developers building personalised experiences, and a data pipeline streaming real-time content data for analysts who want it in their own warehouse. Offering both a dashboard and a raw pipeline recognises that editors and data teams need different things from the same data. A content management system is offered alongside. Pricing is not published on the site.