Contentsquare vs. Parse.ly

It is well suited to businesses with a full time web analyst that will be using the tools to create actionable reports that drive action in the company. It is less appropriate where companies are just looking for some new tools and it will be forgotten soon after implementation. If a website is critical to your business and you have dedicated resources or consultants to help you understand the data, then it is invaluable. I love it.

For people working in online media, or digital content creators, the platform could help them understand their audience and allow them to interact with them in a user-friendly way. Since the digital media industry is booming, Parse.ly can allow the user and the content creators to meet each other's demands and reduce redundancies and bombard the users with unnecessary content.

Incentivized

• The qualitative aspects of user experience are very well captured by ClickTale. We can get solid actionable insights through the various dashboards which track mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, etc.
• The visual conversion funnels give a very good high level view of landing page performance and how they work together.
• The video recordings are especially helpful. The user behavior captured is especially helpful in making decisions about user interface - form fields, call to actions, etc.

• Real-time metrics are great and help us decide what content to follow up on.
• Audience segmenting is key, helps us determine where we're strong and where we're not.
• Historical metrics are also helpful in helping us see what readers come back to overtime, which drives decisions about what content to devote more resources to producing.

Incentivized

• Looking at isolated recordings without creating a segment, we still have to use the old interface
• User interface has been massively improved but there are a few nags here and there that still need to be addressed
• Mobile and desktop should be shown side by side and not separately

Incentivized

• Traffic source. I would like to be able to find the exact social media page a view comes from. Now I can only tell which platform.
• I would like to be able to compare traffic more than one year ago. Now I'm limited to one year.
• Some more customization of reports (or maybe more training).

Incentivized

For small companies with limited user testing budgets, ClickTale serves as a useful user testing tool. When I cannot get the funds for in depth user testing, I always know that I have a baseline of information I can rely on

Cost is always a factor when considering any renewal, so we will always see how that compares to other offerings, but we have been pleased with the functionality from Parse.ly. Importantly, it has engaged news teams, and writers can easily assess their own performance--it is not just a management tool. This wider take-up makes it more likely that we would renew.

Incentivized

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

The Parse.ly platform is very user-friendly and easy to use. User management is simple, and reporting setup only takes a few minutes. They provide very helpful documentation for implementing the scripts on your site and have great customer support to help with custom development such as implementing their content recommendation engine.

Incentivized

Seems to be more bugs than I encounter in Google Analytics, but Parse.ly is always very quick to answer my questions or fix something. It seems like most of my issues are due to communications around my requests being outside of the package we pay for with this tool (i.e., only two years of data).

Incentivized

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is going deeper on UX understanding than traditional web analytics tools. You can truly understand how a page is used (where users click or even miss click, on which part of the page they are spending most of their time, if some links are clicked but bad positioned on the page...), and that's a thing you can't really measure trough a traditional web analytics tool.

Incentivized

Parse.ly excels in providing detailed insights into how users are interacting with specific pieces of content, allowing us to make data-driven decisions about content strategy and optimization. Its real-time reporting also provides us with immediate feedback on the effectiveness of content changes, which is particularly important for content-heavy sites that need to iterate quickly.

Incentivized

• I learned how effective some of our image carousels were. How only 10% of a page visitors were being exposed to only the first slide. People were scrolling down or leaving the page without ever being exposed to 90% of the content. Once I provided this input to stakeholders it was an easy sell to redesign this aspect of the page.
• I used the mouse-move heat map to analyze user interaction with the footer. Showing stakeholders the before and after redesign heat maps did wonders for improving my credibility as an usability analyst.
• We used Clicktale to help analyze our 404 error page effectiveness. Our redesign gave us a 14% lower bounce rate on our redesigned 404 error page. Stakeholders appreciated a quantitative measure to gauge the success of that project.

• Sometimes in meetings our editorial director will point out stories that didn't perform well. To us, that means readers don't really care about the topic, so we'll pivot away from writing about that in the future. That might not be "business objectives" though.

Incentivized