Crowdbooster (discontinued) vs. Parse.ly

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Crowdbooster was a tool to measure the success of Twitter and Facebook posts, with visualizations to track retweets, and track potential impressions created, likes, comments, and how many shares a Facebook post has received. Crowdbooster is no longer available.N/A
Parse.ly
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Parse.ly is a content optimization platform for online publishers. It provides in-depth analytics and helps maximize the performance of the digital content. It features a dashboard geared for editorial and business staff and an API that can be used by a product team to create personalized or contextual experiences on a website.N/A
Pricing
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Features
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Crowdbooster (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Parse.ly
7.6
Ratings
5% below category average
Lead Conversion Tracking00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Pageview Tracking00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Event Tracking00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Reporting in real-time00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Small Businesses
Agency Analytics
Agency Analytics
Score 9.9 out of 10
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Echobox Social
Echobox Social
Score 9.7 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.4 out of 10
Optimal
Optimal
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.5
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.0
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Crowdbooster (discontinued)Parse.ly
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a great tool if you are time and resource-strapped and need assistance in expanding the reach and use of your social media platforms. It is also more beneficial to use if you are a marketing agency. Though you can use it as an individual or individual organization, it might be too much of an upfront set up cost to make it very useful long term.
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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.
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Pros
  • Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
  • Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
  • Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.
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  • 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.
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Cons
  • The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
  • There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
  • The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
  • Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.
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  • 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).
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Likelihood to Renew
Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies
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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.
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Usability
I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.
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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.
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Support Rating
I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.
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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).
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Implementation Rating
If you can demo a free trial, that is definitely the best way to see if this will fit your program's specific needs.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Crowdbooster was cost effective and provided an intuitive, easy to use interface to generate reports quickly and easily. I felt some of the other options were priced either similarly or higher, and were more complicated to use. I was really looking for a solution that was flexible and that would grow with our program and staff.
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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.
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Return on Investment
  • Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
  • Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
  • Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.
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  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Parse.ly Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview in full-screen mode: Many Parse.ly pages, like the Overview, are TV-ready. Keep your entire team up-to-date with live, full-screen dashboards on TVs in your office.Screenshot of Overview screen: See a snapshot of what your audience is paying attention to today so you can make fast decisions about what content to produce or distribute. Customize it to show only what your team cares about by filtering it to a particular author, section, or tag. You can pick what stats and listings are displayed.Screenshot of Real-time posts page: See what’s gathering steam so you can capitalize on attention to every post, campaign, or section.
Real-time data includes the last 24 hours and updates every five seconds. It can be seen, filtered, and sorted on most screens.Screenshot of Historical posts page: Explore historical trends by post, author, section, topic, referrer, or campaign. Compare today’s performance to last week, month, or year.Screenshot of Campaign tracking: Easily tie in your off-site promotion to engagement with your on-site content using UTM parameters.Screenshot of Multi-channel tracking: Track all your content in one place, no matter where it lives.
Compare how your content performances on various distributed channels including your website, AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News.