Reports: Overview and reference guide

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Parse.ly offers a robust suite of reports that can be configured to send as scheduled reports or run on an as-needed report. The reporting suite offers site-level reports as well as customizable reports available for every aspect of the dashboard. Reports can be delivered in HTML or PDF format or as Excel or CSV exports. To get started, navigate to the Reports page in the nav bar.

Video: Creating a new report

Audience Overview Report

A report that gives more granular information about a site’s audience on a month by month basis.

*In order to run this report, your account must have at least 3 months of data and the report type must be activated by your Customer Success Manager.

To set up an Audience Overview report, adjust the following settings:

• How often you want this to run (once, monthly)
• The time period (if you choose to run the report once)

If you set up a recurring report, once the report for the previous month is available (usually a week or so into each month), it will be delivered to your inbox.

Use cases for the Audience Overview report:

• For those within an organization who are concerned with reporting on a high level.
• To monitor the month to month change in visitors, duration of visit, time between visit, and the breakdown between new and returning visitors.
• Works as a scorecard for publishers who want to increase their returning visitors in order to boost loyalty and convert to paying subscribers.

Author and Sections Comparison Report

The Author and Section Comparisons Report is similar to the Benchmarks feature, but in report form. You can create a report comparing stats between authors or sections.

Bottom Listings Report

In order to get better at anything, you need to understand what works. You also need to understand what doesn’t work. Being able to systematically surface the projects that did not produce the results that were expected of them will help you refine your content strategies and achieve more.

Details Report

A report for either the entire site or a specified author, section, or tag that surfaces the number of posts published, views, visitors, and engaged minutes there were for a specified time period. It also shows how people found your content, device and visitor breakdowns, and the top posts, authors, sections, and tags.

To set up a Details report, adjust the following settings:

• Aspect (site/author/section/tag)
• How often you want this to run (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Specific author, section, or tag
• Time period
• Content type
• Metric to sort by

Use cases for Details report:

• Get a high level overview of site performance with the Site details report including the number of posts published, total site page views, visitors and engaged minutes, how people found your content, and top posts, authors, sections and tags.
  • Author/Section/Tag – Get more granular information about a specific author, section or tag.
• We highly recommend that every publisher sets all of their authors up with a weekly recurring Author Details report. Authors will be able to understand:
  • Where their specific audience came from, identify which channels have the biggest growth potential, and implement strategies for growing those specific channels.
  • Build on their already successful posts by writing follow ups if it is a developing story or writing another piece on a topic that is resonating with their audience.
• Tags details reports are most often used to track sponsored content. By tagging each sponsored post with the name of the sponsor, you can easily generate a sleek and easy to digest report that has a URL that can be shared.

Evergreen Overview Report

The Evergreen Overview Report surfaces all posts that receive significant traffic after the average post lifecycle (~3 days).

To set up an Evergreen Overview report, adjust the following settings:

• How often you want this to run (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Time period

Use cases for the Evergreen Overview report:

• Evergreen content is the strongest content on the site that stands the test of time and can be re-promoted when needed.
  • Social Media Managers will look to the top evergreen posts if there is a slow day or week and they need to push posts to Facebook or Twitter.
  • Homepage Managers will do the same when looking for strong content that can be recycled on the homepage.
  • Writers and Editors will look for trends among evergreen content in an effort to try to replicate previous success.

Stats Over Time Report

A report that shows the change in page views and visitors over time.

To set up a Stats Over Time report, adjust the following settings:

• Aspect (site/author/section/tag)
• How often you want this to run (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Time period
• Grouping (for viewing change in data by day, week, month or year)

Use cases for the Stats Over Time report:

• For those within an organization who are concerned with reporting on a high level.
• To monitor the day to day, week to week, month to month or year to year (depending on the parameters) change in site (or a particular author, section or tag’s) visitors, total page views and post page views.
• This is where you can see overall site growth or decline over any specified time period.

Top Listings and Stats Over Time Exports

Spreadsheet versions of the Top Listings and Stats Over Time reports, with more detailed data.

The settings are the same as the Top Listings report and Stats Over Time report, with an option to export the data as a CSV or XLSX file.

Use cases for exports:

• Exports contain more data than reports, making them perfect for ad-hoc analysis.
• CSV files are commonly used for data exchange between platforms, making the data “raw” again so it can be processed by different applications.
• Downloading an XLSX file allows you to re-group, combine, and re-format your audience data in Microsoft Excel.

Top Listings Report

A highly customizable report that surfaces the top videos, posts, authors, sections, tags or referrers for a selected time period.

To set up a Top Listings report, adjust the following settings:

• Aspect (videos/posts/authors/sections/tags/referrers)
• How often you want this to run (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Time period
• Metric to sort by
• Limit (top 10, top 20, top 50, etc.)

Note: You can add filters to include only content that was published within a specific time period or that is specific to a particular author, lifecycle, page type, publish date range, section, or tag.

Use cases for Top Listings report:

• For those within an organization who are concerned with reporting on a high level.
• Editors will set up a recurring top posts report that looks at the previous day’s top posts. Once yesterday’s strongest content is identified, they can ask questions like:
  • Can we re-promote the top content?
  • Have the top stories all been pushed to all social channels?
  • Has more information come out on the topic and can we write a follow up story?
• In addition to top posts, these can also be run to report on top videos, authors, sections, tags, or referrers within a given time period.