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Troubleshooting: Discrepancies

This document outlines our steps and suggestions for helping with any discrepancy you may come across when comparing Parse.ly against other tools.
Be sure to also review our document on common causes, which can be found here: Comparing Parse.ly metrics against other analytics tools

Check the Channels Tracked in Each Tool

There are many avenues for traffic to populate Analytics tools. Parse.ly has partnerships with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News to provide you with analytics about those distributed channels. We also offer integrations for native mobile apps with our iOS and Android SDKs.

It is important to make sure the same channels are tracked in both tools, as it can be the cause of one tool looking significantly higher than the other.

Ensure Page views are firing as expected

Differences in integration & configuration can cause page views for different analytics tools to happen at different times (or not at all).
To test Parse.ly page views you can follow the instructions found on this page: How can I confirm that my site is sending pageviews or videostarts to Parse.ly?.

Some common reasons for Page views being different could be:

  • The Parse.ly Tracking Code is not loaded on the page. Which can happen for a few reasons:
    • The page is part of a template that is not configured to load the Tracking Code
    • The page is on a sub-domain that is not configured to load the Tracking code
  • Infinite Scroll article tracking is set up differently for each tool, with one firing for each new article, and one not.

Reaching out to Parse.ly Support

Should the above suggestions not give satisfying results, we encourage you to reach out to the Parse.ly Support Team. When doing so, please include the following information (as appropriate for your situation):

  • With which metrics are you seeing a discrepancy of > 9%? (Page views? Visitors? etc.)
  • Where in your Parse.ly Dashboard are you looking when you see this discrepancy? (Please provide a link)
  • What other tool are you comparing Parse.ly to? (Google Analytics? Adobe?)
    • Can you share an export or screenshot of the data from this other tool?
  • Have you recently made any structural changes to your site that could cause Parse.ly to track differently? (New CMS, Infinite Scroll Articles, etc.)

Including as much of the above information in your email to support@parsely.com would be very beneficial or our investigation and should help us find a resolution faster.

Last updated: March 17, 2023