UK company Lead Forensics offers their eponymous platform for lead generation and web analytics.
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Parse.ly
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Parse.ly is a content optimization platform for online publishers. It provides in-depth analytics and helps maximize the performance of the digital content. It features a dashboard geared for editorial and business staff and an API that can be used by a product team to create personalized or contextual experiences on a website.
If you want to understand if the things you're doing in the market place are improving your audience reach, then Lead Forensics is a great tool. It's all very well to network, email, win awards and so on, but you will want to address any inconsistency in how effective outreach activities are. Lead Forensics is great for this.
Parse.ly is a great tool for publishers who want to track engagement and audience behaviour across websites. With Parse.ly, we can easily track metrics like pageviews, time spent on page, and scroll depth to see which content is resonating with our audience and optimize our content strategy accordingly. Our marketers found Parse.ly to be an excellent tool for tracking the effectiveness of our campaigns. We can use Parse.ly to track metrics like referral sources, conversion rates, and engagement by audience segment to see which channels and tactics are driving the most engagement and conversions.
The menu could be improved, maybe by giving the chance of a "basic" and an "expert" menu.
The instructions are good and exhaustive but they might be improved.
The most difficult part of Lead Forensics is how some colleagues will use it and - should they not understand - they won't. There should be a way to interest even the less technological colleagues that this tool is for their best.
As an employee, this is difficult for me to comment as I am not directly funding or making these business decisions. However, it is a tool many get on with for surface level data that is useful to editorial teams.
The tool takes a bit to learn and you go through an onboarding to get a better understanding. Once you go through that, the tool is very user friendly and a piece of cake to use - anyone can go through it, no IT skills need to run and manage their platform.
The Parse.ly platform is very user-friendly and easy to use. User management is simple, and reporting setup only takes a few minutes. They provide very helpful documentation for implementing the scripts on your site and have great customer support to help with custom development such as implementing their content recommendation engine.
While we have not had a lot of issues, the Lead Forensics team has been helpful in addressing them. The software is fairly intuitive, and issues rarely arise. This could also be from a lack of use on our part, but we have not had a great deal of interaction with the customer support team.
I rate this question this way solely because I haven't requested any support. I feel where I will eventually get support would be when we take Parse.ly up on some training that is being offered. We are looking to do that at some point after the first of the year and when our schedules support it.
Lead Forensics is the best as far as I can tell, but choices that are a fraction of the cost come pretty close. Some places like ThomasNet even throw this functionality in for free now. I guess it's a question of if you view this type of intelligence as a luxury or essential.
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.
So far we are working on generating an ROI. We did not accurately estimate the time and processes needed to manage the software and processes.
It is interesting to see which companies are engaging in our site that we did not know about, so there is a knowledge ROI there. Just need to figure out better execution to turn it into revenue.
Sometimes in meetings our editorial director will point out stories that didn't perform well. To us, that means readers don't really care about the topic, so we'll pivot away from writing about that in the future. That might not be "business objectives" though.
