Overlay: FAQ & Troubleshooting

Assuming that you have installed the Overlay bookmarklet, and have reviewed its features, you may have additional questions. Please see our FAQ and Troubleshooting guide below.

What is “Post Tracking”?

One common use case for our overlay is URL tracking, otherwise known as Post Tracking, which is a tool that customers can use to look at click-through rate for a given article. We have information on how well the post performed as far as click-through rate is concerned. This is still important information for a customer, as it provides insight on how their posts are performing.

What is “Slot Tracking”?

Slot Tracking allows customers to designate “spaces” on a site that our overlay will track. The most common place for Slot Tracking is a home or index page.

This gives customers the ability to see which areas on their sites receive the most clicks. In this way, you can prioritize site real estate such that their most successful “slots” hold the articles that are most important. A misconception for Slot Tracking is that this is the only use case for the overlay, which is not the case, but it is one of the more powerful use cases. Slot Tracking requires setup and conceptual synchronization between Parse.ly and the customer for effective use.

How are the two different?

Differentiating between the two requires a change in perspective. If one thinks of “slots” as “keys” on a page, and “posts” as the “value” assigned to each key, then the dichotomy becomes clearer. “Slot Tracking” provides insight on the success of each different “area” on a page regardless of its location on the page, meaning it tracks both the “key” and the “value,” while “Post Tracking” gives us information on the success of the specific article. Thus it becomes clear how powerful Slot Tracking is because it will tell the customer not only how well a given article is doing because Post Tracking is part of the analytics of Slot Tracking, but it also can compare how much traffic that specific area of the page does over time, leading to more holistic analytics you can track each slot granularly.

Why is Slot Tracking More Complicated?

The reason Slot Tracking can compare areas on a webpage against themselves is because it requires that all slots that customers want to compare all have the same slot-ID, as well as the same X-Path inside their HTML. For static websites that do not structurally vary from page to page with respect to their slot setup, this is no problem. We’ll be able to track slot performance without issue as long as the relevant slots have the same X-Path.

Where this breaks down is in cases where a site can have multiple different configurations and different content within each configuration. For example, if the same site has two different possible permutations for their homepage, Slot Tracking will fail if the two configurations do not have the same HTML X-Paths. The following sections will break down the most common use cases that we at Parse.ly have found for our Overlay.

Overlay and Slot Tracking Use Cases

“I would like to see, at a glance, the success of a given piece of content”

This is a cut-and-dry simple case for just using Post Tracking. There is no comparison needed here between posts that can’t be done by simply looking at the traffic for each post, which is made easily available using the Overlay in its most simple form. You can read about the standard overlay in our documentation.

“The slots (placements) on my page are static and I want to analyze the performance of these slots”

This is a case for using Slot Tracking. You can implement this easily because the structure of the homepage (i.e. the X-Path that our overlay will look for when comparing slots) will be the same every time.

“My homepage has a few different permutations, and I would like to compare placements between these versions”

In this case, using Slot Tracking will prove to be difficult. This is because our overlay will struggle to compare slots across webpages where the structure of the site is different. There are a couple of ways forward here:

Set up Slot Tracking such that it only tracks slots between similar homepages that have the same X-Path configurations. This gives the customer comparison data only between homepages that are structured similarly:

Setting up Slot Tracking such that there are common X-Path elements across homepage permutations, treating each aforementioned “key” as its own entity across permutations so that the Overlay looks for those X-Paths specifically for comparisons. This will require the most work on the part of both Parse.ly and the customer to coordinate this:

Troubleshooting

Having trouble with the overlay? Here are some common situations for:

All Users

Disable all browser extensions to check for conflict.

Overlay badges appear solely on content from the same domain. External domain content will not show badges, even if that external domain has its own Parse.ly Dashboard.

If your page doesn’t have a lot of traffic, then there may not be enough information to display. You may close the overlay window, click through a link, return to your homepage, and repeat if desired. Open the overlay again; a badge should appear in a couple of minutes.

If you require additional assistance, please contact Parse.ly Support.

WordPress Parse.ly Plugin users

If you are using the wp-parsely plugin, then you may have the setting “Track Logged-In Users” set to “No”. In this case, we recommend logging out of WordPress to view the overlay.

AMP

The Google AMP framework does not support overlay.