Setting Preferences for Sites & Networks

Admins can customize the Parse.ly Analytics dashboard for their site, site group or network of sites.

• Week Starts On: Choose Sunday or Monday as the starting day of the week.
• Default Metric: Choose a core metric and encourage your whole organization to focus on it.
• Default Page Type: Choose to show only posts or all pages. We recommend the latter option for websites with a lot of content that aren’t blog posts or articles.
• Default Time Range: we recommend Pulse (real-time) for sites with a high volume of traffic; and we recommend Historical for sites with a lower volume of traffic.
• Enabled Aspects: Unchecking a tab will hide it in the dashboard. For instance, if you work on a company blog, you might want to hide the Sections tab because you don’t organize your content into separate sections.
• Time Zone: Please contact us at support@parsely.com to change the time zone for a site.

Change preferences for a site

Site and network admins can change the preferences for a single site.

1. Select the site from the site drop down in the Dashboard top bar.
2. Click the account silhouette icon (👤) to reveal the drop-down menu.
3. Click Preferences.
4. Click on the drop downs to change each preference.
5. Click Save.

Change preferences for a site group

Only site admins who have access to all sites in a site group can change that site group’s preferences.

1. Select the site group from the site drop down in the Dashboard top bar.
2. Click the account silhouette icon (👤) to reveal the drop-down menu.
3. Click Preferences.
4. Click on the drop downs to change each preference.
5. Click Save.

Change preferences for a network of sites

Only network admins can change the preferences for a network of sites.

1. Select the network name from the top bar. After this, the drop down should show All Traffic.
2. Click the account silhouette icon (👤) to reveal the drop-down menu.
3. Click Preferences.
4. Click on the drop downs to change each preference.
5. Click Save.

Time zones for Site Groups and Networks

A group of sites may share the same time zone or they may be different. Let’s explore the expected behavior of each scenario.

Site Preferences

Network Preferences

Network, Pulse: All sites share the same time zone

Network, Pulse: Sites do not share the same time zone

When the network contains a mixture of time zones, we set everything relative to the current time (displayed at the right edge of the graph). For such a scenario, we recommend selecting the Last 24 Hours filter so that you may evaluate each site in a consistent manner, regardless of their location.

Network, Historical: Sites do not share the same time zone

In the Network Historical view, one may look at the traffic of “Today”. In this case, “today” is a summation of traffic from three sites. We captured this screenshot at 3pm (GMT-5), the local time for one site is 8pm (GMT), and the local time for the other two sites is 9pm (GMT+1). When the day is complete, we will have 24 hours of data from each site from midnight to midnight at each respective time zone.

Rounding errors of consideration

There are some considerations to keep in mind if one chooses to add numbers on such a screen as this. The first is that there are many calculations running on the page in real-time, so it’s possible to find some of the calculated results lagging behind the others. And not all metrics are suitable for adding together due to factors like the “hotel problem“.