We’re in the era of data everywhere. As the Web becomes more social (not there yet — see below), publishers have to look at even more touch points. We spoke with Sachin Kamdar, CEO of social analytics company Parse.ly, about some of the hurdles publishers keep tripping over.
Is yours an up-and-coming company with high content output and striving for major visibility in the web space? Well, it’s time to make investment in Parse.ly Dash, the “predictive dashboard” that pays special attention to what’s trending right now and how to capitalize on what everyone is talking about on the Internet in real-time.
If you’re looking for analytics that drill down, separate and categorize every page on your website, Parse.ly Dash will be more than happy to serve you. You can sort your content by author, topic, page and referral to get a good idea of not only where everyone is looking, but what sort of content to produce further down the road. Parse.ly Dash will actually suggest what topics your website should write about, and what trends are just breaking on the surface. The analytics dashboard offers multilateral control to the user in a more comprehensive way than most products do — you can essentially use it to plan for your website’s future content based on what your users respond to best.
Last year, when “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” was released in theaters, ApartmentTherapy.com noticed something weird in its social analytic dashboard: its audience was heavily talking about the film across the social Web. A light bulb went off: Let’s take an archived article from 2010 showing where people can buy furniture that was described in protagonist Lisbeth Salander’s room and repurpose it for those who seemed to be really, really interested (as based on the traffic coming from the social nets). The result: a huge spike in traffic, to the tune of up to almost 4,000 hits that day, 2,000 the following and then another little spike the following week, according to ApartmentTherapy’s CEO Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan.
Hive is the natural choice to power the offering. Assuming Kontagent stores data in Hadoop, its backend is already setup to handle the new service. Additionally, Hive’s SQL-like nature means a minimal learning curve for customers once it has been abstracted underneath the Kontagent UI.
This is the kind of thing we might expect to see down the road from companies like Parse.ly — which has suggested it might open up customer data to custom analytics — or even more-established firms such as Clickable. When users get an itch to go exploring their data, why not be the one to let them do it?
The publishing world is one area exploring big data for a variety of purposes, moving beyond the ad space, and this is where Parse.ly hopes to take its publisher-specific solution.
“The interesting thing about where we are and where we want to go is that there’s a lot of big data solutions for publishers, but it’s been mostly for ads,” says Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar. “The interesting thing is not just on the ad side, but on content creation and promotion. As content and editorial technology starts to come closer to the ad side, what will that look like and result in regarding bottom line profit?”
In that regard, the AP’s new database sounds similar to the value proposition for publishing analytics tools like Parse.ly, which launched earlier this year and already has some big-name clients under its belt. Parse.ly analyzes clients’ web content based on the text rather than the metadata, which means publishers without strict metatagging procedures or crack data analysts can still get deep insights into what topics are driving traffic.
