Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our Q&A series with Parse.ly Dash customers. Every few weeks we’ll feature an awesome publisher that’s using Dash and dig into how they’re making use of freshly grown insights.
We recently had the privilege to interview Tom Bray, Senior Director of Digital News Operations for The Press Enterprise, to give us insight as to how PE.com uses Dash to better understand their readers. The Press-Enterprise and PE.com are THE sources for news and information in Inland Southern California.
Parse.ly: Why did you choose to use Dash at your publication? What were the pain points or opportunities you were trying to address?
Tom: Our technology guru entered into an impromptu partnership with the company. We sought information that would we could:
Make available to our whole newsroom team
Organize by post, author, section
Be easier to use than alternative indexes
Report as close to real-time as we can get
Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?
Tom: We did compare Parsely with other products and it came down to a choice of two. We eventually decided to work with Parsely because I already knew a few of its notable clients. I was also aware the company was funded (so wouldn’t be disappearing off anywhere soon) and it also had an all-star founding team. What’s more, Parsely has a particularly receptive team who have been incredibly helpful at demonstrating the value of the product but also building new features.
Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?
Tom: Speed, urgency and sophistication. It has totally reinvented how we do our online decision-making.
Parse.ly: What are some of the primary use cases for Dash at your publication?
Tom: Every one of our reporters in the newsroom has an account and has access to the dash. We ask them not to compare their page views to their peers, but to chart their own work. We hope this allows them to cite trends in what their readers are interested in.
Parse.ly: How often are you and/or your team using Dash on a typical day? Are you in the system constantly? Do you check on an case-by-case basis? How is it integrated into your workflow?
Tom: The use is constant. I keep it up on my screen while performing other tasks. We seek trends all day long for organizing posts on our web site. The dash allows to pick up on trends quickly and respond just as quickly.
Parse.ly: What new features would be most useful to your business?
Tom: We need to build the perfect individual dashboard for each reporter and editor. It should allow them to gauge:
Who their readers are?
Where they come from?
Where they go when they leave?
What topics that bring them back?
When they access our posts?
Which device they use?
What “path’ they take from one source of information to another?
Their all-time most popular posts?
Their all-time most popular tags/keywords/people?
- Tom Bray, Senior Director of Digital News Operations for The Press Enterprise
Editor’s Note: This is the third post in a new Q&A series with Parse.ly Dash customers. Every other week we’ll feature an awesome publisher that’s using Dash and dig into how they’re making use of freshly grown insights.
We recently had the privilege to interview Zee Kane, the Editor in Chief and CEO of The Next Web, to shed some light on how he’s using Dash to shape conversations on the Web. The Next Web is a fast-paced online publisher reporting on International technology news, business and culture. As one of the early adopters to Dash, they’ve provided us with critical feedback that lead to the development of new features and capabilities, and more-broadly, helped us hone in on the specific needs of publishers.
Parse.ly: Why did you choose to use Dash at The Next Web? What were the pain points or opportunities you were trying to address?
TNW: I chose to use Dash at TNW after hearing about it via a peer in the tech industry. The reason I was initially drawn to try it is quite simply its focus on analytics for the publisher. I’d been looking for a tool that truly gave us insight into the content and our performance explained in publisher language rather than your standards analytics jargon.
Parse.ly: I’m sure you use or considered using other products. How did you decide on Parsely Dash?
TNW: We did compare Parsely with other products and it came down to a choice of two. We eventually decided to work with Parsely because I already knew a few of its notable clients. I was also aware the company was funded (so wouldn’t be disappearing off anywhere soon) and it also had an all-star founding team. What’s more, Parsely has a particularly receptive team who have been incredibly helpful at demonstrating the value of the product but also building new features.
Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?
TNW: The primary advantage that Dash gives us is the ability to narrow down by both by content and author to establish what and who is performing particularly well or poorly. Whilst other analytics tools are ideal for tracking traffic, referrals, growth and more. Dash is a publisher and editors tool for establishing the realities of what content and which authors are performing well in near real time too.
Parse.ly: What new features would be most useful to your business?
TNW: Three features that would be the most useful: 1. Reports: Being able to receive email reports at specific times detailing how we’ve performed during particular periods would be incredibly useful. 2. Real Time: Currently Dash is only able to reflect on the activity on the site over the last 10 minutes, good but could be better. Making that even faster would help us to manage our site’s content around the Parse.ly’s readings. 3. Greater control over permissions
Parse.ly: Do you use Dash more for getting more value out of existing content, help determine what new content you should create, or to evaluate performance of authors, topics, posts, etc?
TNW: We primarily use it for the latter, to evaluate performance. There really isn’t a tool out there now which does it better, particularly with the author performance tracking. That said, we should absolutely devote some time to the prior once we’ve got into the swings of things. We’re still getting to grips with everything that Dash brings to the table. It’s a deceptively powerful tool.
- Zee Kane, Editor in Chief and CEO of The Next Web
“Personal brand-building in the digital era requires topic expertise, audience engagement and scalable support systems. Managing quality and volume (nearly 100,000 posts were published on Forbes.com last year) is a tricky balancing act between search and social. It requires effective management, the right publishing tools, a state-of-the-art content management system and the sharing of extremely granular data analytics to understand user behavior and preferences. There are also design and navigation challenges in making all the content discoverable. We’ve made a lot of progress over the past 18 months, with enough missteps along the way to know we have much more to do.”
Editor’s Note:This is the second post in a new Q&A series with Parse.ly Dash customers. Every other week we’ll feature an awesome publisher that’s using Dash and dig into how they’re making use of freshly grown insights.
Parse.ly recently interviewed Christian Lowe, Managing Editor at US News & World Report, and Carson Smith, Web Analyst at US News & World Report, to gain a better understanding of how they’re using Dash to inform editorial decisions. Data has long been at the foundation of US News, and as is such we were eager to learn how our publishers-built tools and data insights performed in the hands of data-hungry infromavores. Read on to see what Christian and Carson have to say about data and editorial intuition, the analytics playing field, and specifically how they’re leveraging Dash at US News.
The Thoughts of Christian Lowe, Managing Editor
Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?
Christian: Easy UI, ability to check immediately what content is doing well–both internally and externally—and why it’s doing well.
Parse.ly: What are some of the primary use cases for Dash at your publication?
Christian: Check trending stories and past story performance. Chart referrers. Make editorial decisions based on global story trends.
Parse.ly: How often are you and/or your team using Dash on a typical day? Are you in the system constantly? Do you check on an case-by-case basis? How is it integrated into your workflow?
Christian: I have Dash running all day from the moment I log into my workstation to the minute I leave. I’m near constantly checking the performance of our content and am benchmarking against past performance. I also have started to look at Macro trends like overall site traffic etc.
Parse.ly: What’s your favorite story (crazy, funny, surprising, etc.) about using Parse.ly?
Christian: Using Dash’s “Worldwide Trends” function, we noticed midway through the day that the search terms Vladimir Putin and McCain were trending high. Within 45 minutes from assignment to posting, our story on the controversy was the top result in Google search on the subject.
Parse.ly: What new features would be most useful to your business?
Christian: I would like a more accurate way to dig down into the referrals. For example, I can see that a story had traffic from, say, Yahoo News, but I can’t see whether that traffic came from an internal link within a previous story in Yahoo, or just a stand alone URL on the Yahoo News page.
I would also like a more robust realtime metrics page which shows which posts are trending and where the traffic is coming from. I don’t care so much about topics or keywords.
Parse.ly: What are some tips you would give to a peer about using data and analytics to make editorial decisions?
Christian: Let the data inform your editorial decisions, don’t let them drive your content.
Parse.ly: Do you use Dash more for getting more value out of existing content, help determine what new content you should create, or to evaluate performance of authors, topics, posts, etc?
Christian: Again, I don’t really use the topics data – we already know what topics we’re going to write on. We need to find out what sorts of stories within those topics are working or not and why. I also find the ability to input URLs and evaluate specific stories very useful.
Parse.ly: Do your writers use Dash at all? How has it affected the way they choose, or find, stories they want to write?
Christian: Not yet, but I am going to selectively give access to some of them. I’d like there to be a way to customize how much data each sign in can get.
The Thoughts of Carson Smith, Web Analyst
Parse.ly: Why did you choose to use Dash at your publication? What were the pain points or opportunities you were trying to address?
Carson: The learning curve for enterprise analytics solutions can be steep. While basic information like top pages were accessed frequently by editors, more advanced features often went ignored.
Dash gives our editors the power to easily access insights that were either not available or required an analyst.
Parse.ly: I’m sure you use or considered using other products. How did you decide on Parsely Dash?
Carson: At first I compared Dash directly with some other real time analytics products. But I realized it’s fundamentally a different tool. In addition to real time, it’s both backward and forward looking.
Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?
Carson: Dash’s focus on action-oriented insights over data dumping gives it a big advantage over traditional tools. Our editors want to know why something happened and what will happen. Dash helps answer both questions quickly.
Parse.ly: What are some tips you would give to a peer about using data and analytics to make editorial decisions?
Carson: Don’t throw intuition out the window. Use analytics data to hone your instincts so your intuition becomes more reliable.
Parse.ly: A lot of people are talking about different types of data journalism, but few people are really doing it. As one of the early movers on this trend, what is the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Carson: Data has long been a foundation of US News’ journalism, but not until recently have we been inundated by so much of it. An important lesson is to identify what data really matters for our business and readers. Analytics tools help to sift wheat from the chaff.
Thanks to Christian and Carson for providing their insight!
[Editor’s Note: This is the first post in a new Q&A series with Parse.ly Dash customers. Every other week we’ll be featuring an awesome publisher using Parse.ly Dash and digging into how they’re leveraging publisher-specific insights to better serve their readers and improve the prosperity of their business.]
We recently had the privilege to interview Janel Laban, the executive editor of Apartment Therapy. Apartment Therapy has been using Dash over the past year and have provided invaluable feedback that shaped the products we build at Parse.ly. Janel’s use of Dash’s publisher insights touches many aspects of their content, readers and editorial work flow. And, for the first time ever, we are very excited to shed some light on exactly how Dash is helping make great publishers even more awesome when put in the capable hands of great editors.
Parse.ly: What advantage does using Dash give you?
Apartment Therapy: I’m finding that I get a very fluid mix of “predictive”, “real time” and “historical” data from Dash that makes it a unique and vital tool. The flexibility of how we can slice up the information temporally as well as topically makes it unusually powerful for many different aspects of my day to day work; from reviewing our past posts, to making social media and other real-time decisions as well as planning future editorial calendars and events.
I’m feeling like I’ve gained a much deeper understanding of how the “long tail” posts figure into our overall picture. We’ve always known it was an important factor, because we create lots of evergreen content that gathers PVs over years, but now we have a clearer picture of the posts that are working for us in this way and how powerful that is.
Also, the support, training, troubleshooting and knowledge that have been shared with the editorial team by the folks at Parse.ly has been invaluable - any time you really know how to make the most of a tool (and have someone to ask when you think it might be able to do something great but you just aren’t quite sure exactly HOW) makes a difference.
Parse.ly: What are some of the primary use cases for Dash at Apartment Therapy?
Apartment Therapy: I’ve been using it most frequently at this point in time (end of year, as we work through final stages of redesign and planning for the upcoming year) as a review and planning tool. I’ve used it to (so quickly and easily!) pull specific-writer-only PV data to help prepare freelancer reviews on which of their posts have been most successful traffic wise in the past year. I also have been digging in to see which types of posts are consistently appealing to our readers when establishing which categories to feature in our new design and to help with monthly theme and event planning for the new year, along with a rethink of some of our social media strategies.
Parse.ly: What new features would be most useful to your business?
Apartment Therapy: Addition of “Design” or “Home” to the pre-established Hot Topics section (and “Food” for our sister site, The Kitchn). Limited access accounts for freelancers.
Parse.ly: Do you use Dash more for getting more value out of existing content, help determine what new content you should create, or to evaluate performance of authors, topics, posts, etc?
Apartment Therapy: Since this is the first really user-friendly, fast tool that I’ve tried for evaluating performance in different ways, that has been my main use of it so far. Being able to see a writers history of how posts performed over time in a few clicks is hugely helpful for reviews. Also, looking deeply at how posts continue to perform over longer periods of time has been invaluable, moving from a best of the day/week/month concept of performance view to a much longer, yet still very specific, view is factoring strongly into my editorial projects planning.
Parse.ly: A lot of people are talking about different types of data journalism, but few people are really doing it. As one of the early movers on this trend, what is the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Apartment Therapy: I’ve been working on Apartment Therapy for a long time, and as analytics tools become more refined, its like walking from a dark room to the sunlight. A game changer, for the better. It doesn’t necessarily impact the spirit of the work we produce - that comes from wanting to create and share good, inspiring, helpful content - but it allows us to refine our understanding of how it’s received, which in turn has increased my commitment to creating high-quality content. It takes out some guesswork on the basic stuff and creates room for the creativity and energy that is a big part of blogging to happen and be recognized, and not lost in the flow.
It’s all about the mix - learning that some posts do really well in the short term (and you need to make the most of them when it’s happening) and others are consistent performers over time (and they are worth cultivating and refreshing on a regular basis) allows us to value different types of performers and find ways to more consistently create both types and feature them in varying ways over time to get them out to as many of our interested readers (and readers-to-be!) as possible. It allows for the learning and improving component of being an online writer/editor/publisher to be ongoing and robust, which in turn, keeps the work fulfilling and rewarding.
– Janel Laban, Executive Editor of Apartment Therapy
Over two years ago, Parse.ly graduated from the then Philadelphia-based (now in NYC and Israel) accelerator, DreamIt Ventures. At DreamIt we planted the seed of an idea that grew into the Parse.ly Reader, an intelligent news reading application that got better as you used it. Parse.ly Reader was successful – it grew in size to several thousands of users in a matter of weeks and had great reviews (ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet, Louis Gray, Thrillist, to name a few).
However, we knew what we built had the potential to not just change the way people consumed content, but how content was created and delivered.
New Yorkers at heart, we came back to the city after DreamIt, itching to contribute to one of New York’s biggest industries – media. Some of the biggest and best publishers on the web call NYC their home, and virtually all of them are looking to leverage new technologies that push the boundaries of traditional content sites.
Several months and meetings later, it was clear that publishers were entering the age of big data – billions of pageviews, millions of readers, thousands of active pages, hundreds of writers and editors. Despite all these signals created by the web, there was a big gap in the tools available to leverage them.
The Early Days
Initially, we thought the problem at hand was content delivery - which is why we built the Parse.ly Reader. The Reader was built to understand a user’s interests, and evolve with the user as his or her interests change. On the web, there were clear examples of other technology companies leveraging personalization technology to fine-tune a user’s experience (Amazon/products, Netflix/movies, Pandora/music). Yet, when it came to content, most online publishers were treating each user the same.
This was our initial Aha! moment and with confirmation from the publishers we were talking to, we were off to the races. We built P3, the Parse.ly Publisher Platform, to deliver personalized recommendations of content to users based on a slew of inputs, ranging from the context of the current article to what other, similar users were interested in. We launched on a few publishers including a top 100 news site and were increasing engagement and readership across the board.
Then, a curious thing happened…
It’s The Data, Stupid!
Some of our publishers started to ask us how we were recommending content. Editors, in particular, were really interested in how we decided what article to show to one user versus another. So, being the tech geeks that we are, we began explaining the whole stack:
We analyze all content on your site to understand exactly what each post is about from a topic perspective
We measure reader interest across these topics and start to build interests graphs between users
We look at topic, post, and author velocity combined with referral information to give us cues on what might pop
We mash up the treasure trove of data that’s on your site to come up with recommendations that your users will love
Specifically, editors at separate organizations asked us the same question: Can you share some of that data with us? You know, the topic data and the data on authors?
Begrudgingly, we agreed, and started to send out reports on a monthly basis.
Editors: “Hmm, this is great! Can we get this quicker?”
Parse.ly: “Uh, sure. We can give it to you weekly.”
Editors: “Awesome! Actually, it’d be great if we could get this daily.”
Parse.ly: “OK, what’s up here? Why do you care more about the data than the recommendations?”
Well, as it turns out, nobody had really showed them this data before, and the data was simply eye-opening for the editorial team. They were using it to go beyond monitoring individual articles to understanding what was resonating with their audience.
Queue the second Aha! moment in early 2011. We took a step back and did some research on analytics tools for online publishers. What we found was astounding. Almost no innovation had happened on the analytics side for online publishers. Most tools were one-size-fits-all systems that treated an e-commerce site the same as a content site, and obviously, that’s not the way to do it.
Content-based sites are dramatically different than an e-commerce property from both a data and business perspective.
It’s no wonder these publishers were clamoring for data that provided fresh insights on their property. Publishers need to know how their content breaks out by topic, what causes a post to go viral, why one author does better with search traffic than another, and a bevy of other key insights that are specific to their needs. We knew this was a big opportunity, and decided to dive head-first into the analytics space.
Meanwhile, In The Workshop…
2011 was the year Parse.ly Dash was born. We quickly built a bare bones tool to surface some of the data that we were collecting for publishers in the early months of 2011, and released it into private beta shortly thereafter. The response after showing a few major publishers the first version of Dash was both invigorating and a bit unexpected.
Not only did they understand what we were building, but they were extremely vocal with feedback that helped shape and evolve Dash throughout the year. This feedback can be summarized through three key areas that represent he biggest opportunities for improvement:
Tracking. Publishers had tools that tracked data, but unfortunately they were not tracking the data that these publishers really cared about. Key metrics around topics, authors, sections, referrers were just not available. Luckily, our backend technology was built to pick up on exactly these areas.
Planning. Tracking wasn’t enough to really be competitive in the media industry. Publishers needed to be proactive around topics that were trending on their site and across the web. Further, they needed tools that look at what would happen in the next several minutes, hours and days. We spent many engineering resources developing technology that would measure trends local to a property against trends that are happening across the entire web. This allowed publishers to not just identify patterns, but actually understand what was causing them. This has become invaluable for many of our customers.
Promoting. As social media became a major distribution channel for content, so has the need to understand exactly how content goes viral and who on the social web has the most influence. Marketing to the right audience and in the most effective way is incredibly important to publishers moving forward, and Dash gives them this capability by actually plugging directly into the biggest social APIs.
We are also proud to say that Dash has offered a humane interface for analytics. We built the product with the user in mind. Most analytics tools are clunky, have a steep learning curve, or don’t go far enough with their analysis. Dash is different. It’s beautiful to look at, simple to use, and almost unassumingly powerful. The data, and as a consequence the insights, are what shine here.
Finally, Dash was built with the understanding that most publishers aren’t interested in doing heavy integrations. We make it a snap to integrate with Dash. You simply drop a Javascript include on the footer of your site, and we give you the most powerful analytics tool on the market in about a week. Really, that’s it. No coding, customization, or painful backend integrations required!
Without further ado, meet Dash
I’d like to invite any publisher who’s interested in trying out Dash to do so. We offer a 30-day free trial and tiered pricing to match your size and needs.
Thank You
I’d like to thank our early pilot customers. You’ve been incredible to work with, and have provided us with invaluable feedback. We’ll continue to work tirelessly to give you the best analytics tools on the market.
I want to thank our investors and advisers for giving us the resources, experience and insight to capture this opportunity and many more in the future.
And of course - a big shout out to the Parse.ly team. I’ve lost count of the tireless hours and late nights that have gone into Parse.ly Dash — from the earliest days in 2009 to present. The team here is inspiring to work with, and I can’t wait to keep pushing online media forward.
There’s much more work ahead of us, and we’ve already started on the next phase of Dash, so stay tuned for latest updates and more from the team, right here on the blog, or you can follow us on Twitter.
“And while the advances in media consumption technology for readers have been rapid, the publisher side of web technology hasn’t kept up with the pace.”
You may have seen that Parse.ly was featured in a TechCrunch article a couple of days ago. It was a great writeup by Sarah Perez, and we wanted to share it with you here.
The article actually includes a few screen shots of Dash that had not been seen before, so this is really the first public look at Dash. Now that it’s out in the open though, we encourage you to take a look!
Here’s a quick summary of the article as well:
Parse.ly has been in stealth mode, but we’ll be launching Dash publicly this month. We have had an amazing group of early adopters that have helped us tweak Dash until we got it just right. Now, we have a fine tuned product that is designed specifically for large-scale content publishers…the biggest publishers in the world honestly. Dash is designed to help publishers maximize their pageviews by surfacing insightful trends and directly actionable opportunities. We’re taking predictive analytics into new territories.
There’s much more to Dash, and you’ll be hearing more about it very soon. For now, definitely check out the TechCrunch article. Say hello and follow us on Twitter for more updates!
According to BGR, the iPhone 5 is scheduled to launch in Fall 2012. So what does this mean for the publishing industry? It means there are going to be a lot of iPhone 5 articles coming out over the next 9 months, assuming that’s when the product will actually launch. This is great news for publishers. Apple fans are an extremely loyal bunch and always looking for the next scoop…plenty of opportunity to attract new readers.
So according to the BGR article, the iPhone 5 will have a rubber or plastic case built in, a redesigned antenna, and a 4 inch display. Scheduled to debut roughly just 12 months after the iPhone 4s, I wonder how many people are still glad they upgraded to the iPhone 4s when they did…
In any case, I’m sure the tech publishing world is already salivating over the predictable opportunity that is to come. Yes, I’m talking about that evening when the “responsible” Apple employee “accidentally” leaves an iPhone 5 prototype at a bar after drinking too much, or the prototype gets left in a New York City cab that just happens to pick up a Gizmodo writer, etc. For now, we have a few photos, some reports, and lots of speculation starting to pick up. But if we know Apple at all, expect a steady stream of articles to gradually generate buzz until the iPhone 5 just dominates the news. It should be a fun ride!
