Parse.ly Overlay and Other Tools

Parse.ly offers a number of features that can help users access data about homepage performance as well as quickly jump to data about a specific page.

The Parse.ly Overlay

The Parse.ly Overlay bookmarklet allows you to track the performance of posts on your homepage or section pages. It shows historical performance for particular page positions (“slots”), so you can see if an article is doing better or worse than the slot’s average.

Overlay tracks slot performance by monitoring the exact location on a page that a reader clicks to get to an article. When a click occurs, Overlay determines the path of the link that’s been clicked—that is, its position on the page relative to other HTML elements—and sends a ping to Parse.ly servers to store it.

The bookmarklet then creates badges in your browser by doing the reverse: retrieving traffic data from our servers and matching an element on the page with the path that was stored on click (shown on the left, below), along with traffic data for that article URL (shown on the right).

“Open in Parse.ly” Bookmarklet

In order to open any article page in Parse.ly, drag the link below to your browser’s bookmarks then click it when viewing an article page to be brought to the post info page within Parse.ly.

“Find in Parse.ly” API Endpoint

In addition to the bookmarklet, we also provide an API endpoint that will resolve a URL to a Parse.ly post info page. To use it, the syntax is as follows:

https://dash.parsely.com/<your site ID>/find?url=<place URL here>