Parse.ly Product & Support Updates

Campaign filters

You can now filter by individual campaign parameters (e.g. campaign, medium, source etc.) on any listings page. Click “Save as” to create a new Campaign Group or update an existing one on the fly!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to a listings page, like Posts.
2. From the Filters, select Campaign.
3. Click Show individual campaign fields. (Or pick an existing Campaign Group.)
4. Add fields.
5. If you want to save or update the group, click Save as.
6. You’ll then be prompted to update or name your new Campaign Group.

Audience Overview report

On September 4th, all Parse.ly Enterprise customers can run a report to get a better understanding of loyalty and visitor behavior for August 2019. Schedule this report to run monthly to receive it automatically in future months! (You can find it in the reporting suite under Advanced.)

PDF reports

There’s a reason the PDF has been around since 1993. It’s easy to save, store, and forward to your colleagues. And now you can do that with your Parse.ly reports!

All you need to do is select PDF as the format when you create a report:

Export a spreadsheet of Parse.ly users

Need to get a better understanding of your organization’s Parse.ly usage? Admins can now export a list of Parse.ly users from the Users page.

1. Click the account dropdown on the right.
2. Click Users.
3. Click Export user data.

Check your organization’s Parse.ly usage

On the Billing page, admins can now see the visitors and page views for this month and the last month, as well as total users.

1. Click the account dropdown on the right.
2. Click Billing.

See your Parse.ly permissions and admins

For those who have ever had a question about Parse.ly but but weren’t sure who to ask, this update is for you! Parse.ly now shows a list of your permissions and admins on the User Settings page.

1. Click the account dropdown on the right.
2. Click the cog next to your email address.
3. From this page, you can change your password, see your permissions, and get a list of the names and email addresses of your Parse.ly admins.

LinkedIn removed from social sort metrics

We’re removed both LinkedIn interactions and referrals from social sorting metrics because LinkedIn shut down an API providing social interaction data for all third-party tools and vendors, not just Parse.ly. We made several attempts to re-gain access to this data by working with LinkedIn’s content and news partnerships team, but we were unsuccessful. Therefore, we had no choice but to drop support for this metric from our product.

Moving forward, Parse.ly will continue to support interactions and referrals as sort metrics for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Parse.ly will treat LinkedIn like any other referrer (such as Instagram or Reddit). You will be able to see LinkedIn referrals:

• on the Referrers tab
• on the LinkedIn referrer details page

Alerts keep you informed about notable traffic to your content. You can now choose to receive alerts on your browser, on your mobile phone, in Slack, or in email when posts receive significantly more traffic than usual.

Learn how to subscribe to alerts and how alerts work:

• in the Alerts product announcement
• in this help doc

When creating a scheduled report, you can now add a custom subject line to the report that will appear when the report arrives in your emailbox.

The new option appears at the bottom of the Parameters screen when creating or editing a report.

The custom title will also appear in the Recently Run and Scheduled tabs in the dashboard interface and will be the title that appears on your HTML report.

Path Fragments

Users now have the ability to use URL path fragments as a filter when viewing post or non-post data.

A path fragment refers to the parts of a URL separated by slashes. For example, in the URL https://tea-fanatics.com/flavors/black-tea/earl-grey/, the path fragments are “flavors” “black-tea” and “earl-grey”.

Two notes about fragments: 1) Data is only available since Oct. 1; 2) Your site must have a URL structure where paths are present in order for data to be available.

Path fragments are displayed like this:

When making a selection, the list of fragments will immediately narrow to show only the lower-level fragments that appear with the selected fragment.

The height of each row shows the popularity of the fragment compared to other fragments. That is, the taller the path fragment’s box, the more page views it received (or referrer views when on a referrer detail page) relative to the other path fragments.

Once you have selected a path fragment, you can click on the “View Details” option to see full information about URLs matching the pattern.

You can drill down as many levels as need be – additional levels can be added to the screen using the arrows in the upper right corner of the Paths box.

Paths are available as a filter in all sections of the dashboard as well as in the reporting suite.

Channel Filtering in Reports

In the reporting suite, you now have the option to see data specifically for Google AMP or Facebook Instant – or specifically without both channels. September 18, 2023 Update: Facebook Instant Articles is deprecated.

In Top Listings, Details and Stats Over Time, these new options are now available, giving you increased visibility into the impact of your efforts on those platforms.

Saved Views

You now have the ability to save configured views in the dashboard, a request we’ve heard from many users and the highlight of this release.

You can now, for example, set up a combination of filters once and not have to redo those configurations each time you use the dashboard. Perhaps you want to quickly see what stories in a specific section received the most traffic from Facebook during the past week. Easy enough:

Or perhaps you want to track a specific group of authors on a single screen. Again, easy to set up and save:

Simply save the desired view and decide whether to share it with the rest of your organization or keep it for yourself.

Once you save a view, you can access it by using the star in the menu in the upper right portion of the screen:

Useful Views

In the Guide tool, we’ve also added some quick clicks to popular views. Think of these as useful filters to help you easily find the information you need:

These appear in each dashboard screen where the Guide button is available.

Audience Segments

Often, it’s hard to pick out the habits and interests of niche audiences from sweeping aggregate trends. With audience segments, you can understand and optimize for audience subsets like subscribers, users, regional readers, and more.

• Learn how Bloomberg Media and WSJ put audience segments to work.
• Reach out to your account manager or support@parsely.com to talk possibilities and pricing.
• Read about audience segment implementation.

This release aims to help you get more out of the reporting suite.

See campaign performance in Top Listings and Details reports

Get a high-level look at the top campaigns or dig into a detailed report on a specific campaign’s performance.

When you create a new report, you can add campaign data by selecting Campaigns and a campaign aspect. (Note: campaign data is not yet available for Stats Over Time, Evergreen Overview, or Audience Overview reports.)

Campaign data also appears in all Details reports, so you can see the top campaigns by section, author, tag, etc.

Create a Details report for your whole network or a site group

If you have Network Rollup enabled, you can see how content is performing across your entire network or a group of sites. Select All Traffic or the site group name in the drop down and then select Network or Site Group when you create a Details report.

Filter Details and Stats Over Time reports

Add filters to your reports to show the performance of certain topics in a section, specific sections for an author, etc.

Other improvements

• Stats Over Time reports and exports now contain a column showing the number of posts published in the selected interval.
• Export Top Listings directly from author, section, or tag details pages.
• Get an export or report for a network’s top sites.
• UI updates to the mobile app.

New

• Admins can choose the default time range, metric, and more in the new Preferences panel.

Improved

• Filter to see all the tags, campaigns, sections, and authors that start with a certain string of characters (Show me all campaigns that start with daily).
• Use multiple filters at once! (Show me all posts by Samwell Tarly in the Science section tagged with medieval-history).
• The Evergreen Overview report has gone granular. See the top evergreen posts by author, section, tag, campaign group, etc.
• Filter the Top Listings and Evergreen Overview reports by campaign group.
• The Top Listings Export now includes “video starts” and “engaged minutes” columns where video tracking is enabled.
• We tweaked the way we display Tweets.
• We changed the way we calculate new/returning visitors. Learn more.

New

• AMP and Facebook Instant Articles are now officially supported, with their own listings page and details pages. Get instructions for integrating Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles with Parse.ly. September 18, 2023 Update: Facebook Instant Articles is deprecated.
• Referrer badges appear when a large percentage of a post’s traffic is from a single referrer.

Improved

• The redesigned tweets display introduces new ways to understand Twitter engagement.
• Schedule recurring reports to track progress toward your monthly or quarterly KPIs.
• Filter Overview listings by publish date.
• Video badges now show how many visitors started watching videos on a page.

Improved

• Overview can now be customized to show the information that matters most to you, like your stories, sections, or beats.
• The header got a redesign to make things a bit less cramped.

New

• Create a campaign group to filter paid traffic or any other traffic tagged with campaign parameters.
• Network admins can now group multiple sites (by vertical, location… you name it) to see data in one place.
• We’ve added a footer that lets you send feedback and shows tips for getting more out of the Parse.ly dashboard.