Small nonprofit newsroom Current uses Parse.ly to tune in to its audience

Public broadcasters across the country are slashing staff following Congress’s decision to defund them. But South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB) is not one of the nation’s largest networks, and bigger stations have cut more staff from a single program. So, is it a story?

According to data from content analytics platform Parse.ly, the answer is yes for Current, the nonprofit trade publication covering U.S. public broadcasting. Digital Editor Mike Janssen can see that every layoff story gets traction, no matter how small.

“Without that information, I would have thought, ‘Oh well, we should only cover the layoffs at the biggest stations, or we should only cover layoffs if it’s a large number of people,’” he says. But “month to month, if you look at our top 10 stories in terms of page views or any metric, it’s largely layoffs. It just confirms, yeah, this is where we need to be focusing our attention because this is what people want to be reading about.”

Parse.ly makes it easy to find those insights, he says. The user-friendly interface delivers crucial data without demanding coding skills. The platform is helping them figure out where their most important readers are coming from and what matters to them. While some other platforms highlight their real-time data dashboards, Parse.ly’s intuitive displays of longer-term trends make it the right tool for a small, niche publication like Current.

Three reasons to use Parse.ly

• In addition to real-time data, Parse.ly’s historical data analysis is especially useful for outlets that publish relatively small volumes of content per day, for whom minute-to-minute updates are less valuable.
• The platform tracks not just page views but engagement time, returning visitors and which articles drive subscriptions.
• Customizable views let each team member focus on what matters to them — whether that’s a specific section, author, or content category — without building complex queries.

Newsroom overview

Founded in 1980 by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the precursor to NPR and PBS, Current’s core audience is people working in public broadcasting. It has been housed at the American University School of Communication since 2011. 

Current publishes daily online stories and a quarterly print publication. The website tallies around 43,000 page views per week. Foundation support, advertising, donations and subscriptions provide revenue. 

Janssen oversees three full-time reporters, an intern and a handful of freelancers. In addition to assigning and editing stories and managing social media channels, he is Current’s “go-to analytics guy, tracking performance of our posts and using that to inform what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.”

Problem: Small newsrooms need simple analytics tools

Data is critical for driving editorial decisions, Janssen says.

Janssen used to work in public radio, and he says some stations did not want to spend money on Nielsen audience-measurement ratings. “I’m just like, ‘Well, how are you figuring out anything about what you’re doing?'”

“If you don’t use analytics tools at all, you’re just flying blind,” he says. “You don’t know if you are actually reaching an audience, you don’t know who the audience is, you don’t know how they’re coming to you. Analytics tools help you understand where the fish are and where to go fishing.”

Users can get some insight into their web traffic through the free Google Analytics platform. But Janssen finds it “bewildering” and hard to use. “I don’t want to go through that trouble,” he adds.

Big media conglomerates have professional data analysts on staff, but that’s just not possible at a small newsroom like Current’s. They need a simple tool that makes the data available without a background in statistics or coding — one that works for busy journalists wearing multiple hats.

Solution: A dashboard focusing on historical data

Janssen says Parse.ly makes understanding audience trends easy, intuitive and convenient, without needing a lot of technical know-how.

Like other content analytics platforms, Parse.ly delivers insights in a set of data-rich dashboards. The main dashboard shows a graph of the day’s traffic, overlaid on a graph of the average for previous days. (For example, on a Monday, it would show that day’s traffic compared to the average of previous Mondays.) 

It displays the day’s page views and unique visitors and shows the average time visitors are spending on each article, a metric called engagement time. Many publications have shifted from page views to engagement time as a key metric. Clickbait headlines can drive page views, but engagement time is a better indicator of interest in the content. Below the graph are two columns showing the top stories over two customizable time periods — for example, top stories today and top stories over the past four hours.

But what’s more useful for Janssen is how Parse.ly handles historical data. Current only publishes a few stories per day, so minute-by-minute traffic data is not that useful. He says Parse.ly makes it easy to look at daily, weekly and monthly data — more informative time frames for a relatively low-volume publication.

Other features important for Current:

• Loyal-audience metrics: Subscriptions are an important source of revenue for Current, and loyal readers who return to the site frequently are more likely to subscribe than occasional readers. “I don’t care so much where the one-time visitors are coming from, but we do want to know where the folks are who keep coming back,” he says. Parse.ly lets him focus on what loyal readers are interested in.
• Engagement time metrics: Sometimes Current publishes longer feature pieces that “may not appeal to everybody,” Janssen says. If the data shows that people who do read it spend time with it, then it was worth the investment. “I want to know that someone is at least engaging with it significantly, even if it’s not our top story that month,” he says.
• Referral metrics: How did readers find an article? Social media? A newsletter? Did they come straight to the site? Search? “If you didn’t have some kind of window into how all that’s working for you, I don’t really know how you would even figure out what to care about,” he says. Parse.ly shows him where readers come from so he can focus on delivering content to those platforms.
• Slack integration: The Current team is fully remote and keeps in touch on Slack. Parse.ly sends an alert to a Slack channel called “Wins” whenever an article gets significant traffic.

Parse.ly also tracks what content drives important audience behaviors — for example, when readers become subscribers. Newsrooms can decide what behaviors to track, a metric called conversions. The platform allows individual users to focus on just the content that matters to them. For example, a reporter covering city hall wants to know how a story is doing compared to other stories on that beat, rather than comparing it to sports coverage, which probably draws more clicks.

Current uses WordPress as its CMS and WordPress owns Parse.ly, so setup and integration were simple, Janssen says. “If you can install a plugin and insert some information into boxes in your CMS, you’ll be fine.” The company says integrating with custom content management systems is also straightforward — adding a line of JavaScript code and following some formatting instructions is all it takes.

Impact: Data-driven decisions

Parse.ly is helping Current keep up with what is important to their audience and how to reach them. Parse.ly data tells Janssen just how important Current’s newsletter is for driving traffic. It lets him know that LinkedIn is an important platform for posting stories — a source of readers he wasn’t expecting.

“I don’t know how I would judge what to focus on if I didn’t have Parse.ly showing me, ‘This is what the audience cares about,'” Janssen says. “Otherwise, it’s just me with my gut saying, ‘Oh, I think that people care about this.'”

Security and privacy

Parse.ly de-identifies all automatically collected data, using anonymous, randomized universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) stored on a per-site basis that are not linked to personal identities. While Parse.ly collects IP addresses and uses cookies, it restricts their use to recognizing unique browsers and devices rather than linking personal identity or sensitive information.

Customers can selectively disable IP address tracking to offer greater privacy for site visitors. Data is stored and backed up on secure Linux servers hosted by Amazon Web Services in the United States. Parse.ly maintains GDPR and CCPA compliance and allows customers to control the data they send, enabling development teams to transmit only the minimum information necessary for proper analytics.

Verdict: Meaningful insights for smaller newsrooms

For a small newsroom, Parse.ly is the right tool to deliver the insights Current needs to find, reach and build its audience. While other content analytics platforms share many of Parse.ly’s features, what Janssen finds most useful is its focus on historical data, which allows newsrooms like Current to track trends on timescales that are meaningful to them.

Plans start at $2,000 per month for sites with up to 5 million monthly unique visitors. That includes real-time and historical data. Conversion tracking costs extra. Features can be customized for each publisher’s needs. 

Alternatives to Parse.ly for analytics

Current previously used Chartbeat for content analytics, but Janssen found that its focus on real-time data didn’t suit the needs of their small, low-volume publication. Google Analytics is the cheapest option (the basic package is free) but the hardest to use. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Marfeel offers the most features and can become the most expensive. The companies don’t post pricing on their websites, so interested newsrooms will have to contact them for custom quotes.

• Chartbeat: In addition to real-time and historical data, Chartbeat features a heads-up display tracking minute-by-minute how stories on the homepage are performing. Offers A/B testing for headlines, images and captions. (Parse.ly only offers headline A/B testing.) Its lowest monthly cost is $1,100, according to the Help Desk scorecard.
• Marfeel: AI-powered platform with automated social media optimization, advanced mobile optimization, and comprehensive monetization tools. Targets publishers focused on mobile-first strategies. It has a free plan that has real-time analytics but not historical data, according to the Help Desk scorecard.
• Google Analytics: Free and provides basic tracking but offers less real-time capability and requires more technical setup. See the Help Desk scorecard for more.

• Category: Case Studies
• Tag: Analytics, homepage, Parse.ly