Kissmetrics vs. Parse.ly

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

Incentivized

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

• Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
• Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
• After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
• You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.

• 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

• The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
• There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
• It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
• A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.

• 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

I used KISSmetrics on a daily basis whilst a summer analyst at a language-learning software startup company called Voxy. To my knowledge, the company continued to use KISSmetrics. I am no longer at Voxy but we were pleased with KISSmetrics.

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

For basic operations, the product is relatively user-friendly, considering how complicated a topic data and analytics can be. The engineering integration work is very straightforward, and building standard report types is pretty easy. However, there were a few rough spots. Event mapping and some of the deeper account settings are not well explained. And the Power Reports functionality is just utterly, impossibly confusing

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

In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

Everytime that I've needed or contacted support, I've received a quick response and timely help! There was even a major issue we had with connecting Unbounce into Kissmetrics. They brought in multiple people and worked with us for hours to make sure we could figure out the issue and get everything running! I have no complaints about the support team!

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

Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

It has been a while since I demoed Heap and Optimizely but the main points that stick out in my head are that Kissmetrics had more transparent and cheaper pricing. Kissmetrics offered all the same functionality, and at least from my personal experience, the staff at Kissmetrics was easier to work with and nicer to interact with.

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

• Improved product
• More insights into users
• More insights into marketing channels and their performance
• Must admit that the live stream was a little bit addictive the first couple of weeks, but it's a necessary evil when you launch new features :)

• 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