May 8, 2012

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

• Tags
• qaseries
• dash
• pe.com

February 23, 2012

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

• Tags
• dash
• qaseries
• thenextweb

February 14, 2012

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!

• Tags
• qaseries
• dash
• usnews