Analytics in Real-Time with Chartbeat Publishing

Marketers have access to an amazing amount of data – from clickstream data to webmaster tools to A/B/C/D/E testing experiments and keyword data, from surveys to PPC campaign reports, and social media monitoring to competitive data, all the way to backend tracking, usability testing and believe-it-or-not-some-people-still-pull-ranking-reports.

Your list surely goes on. You live in a world full of numbers, and yes, collecting and analyzing information can all be overwhelming at times.

What’s fun about data is that if you love it you eventually find the right combinations of information to help you answer your toughest questions. Data is meant to be your guide to get to the insights you need.

If you create a significant amount of content on your websites and/or are a publishing or media site, then you should think about augmenting your arsenal and trying out yet another data source: Chartbeat Publishing.

What is Chartbeat Publishing (CBP)?

CBP is a real-time analytics tool that allows you to track concurrent visitors on your website that are interacting with your content at any given time.

So what? Doesn’t Google Analytics already do that? Not exactly.

CBP is able to track what happens between the clicks much better (e.g., reading, writing, scrolling, etc.). Also, CBP is different in the way it presents data, which is mostly focused on the content itself and about understanding engagement with your internal links, pages, and so on.

Why CBP is Worth a Look

One of the best things about CBP is that it’s designed for content creators rather than web analysts.

When was the last time your digital content team asked for a performance report and it took a few hours? A couple of weeks? Until the following quarter?

What’s great about CBP is that it allows your content team to visually understand what’s happening with the pages at the same time people are navigating the site to make decisions in the moment.

For example, CBP has a feature called Heads Up Display (HUD), which each author and editor can install on their own browsers and allows them to take a look at the following live on your site:

Total concurrent visitors on the page.Traffic sources (referring links, search, social, direct, internal).Internal Link Performance which can give you some really cool actionable insights (e.g., how is a link to an article performing on any given page in terms of clicks and should you adjust the position to try and increase visibility where articles typically get more clicks).Article trends (e.g., clicks-per-minute).Scroll depth, which shows how far users typically scroll down a page and where most users don’t read past.

Take a look at a live demo of the CBP Heads Up Display (HUD) on Gizmodo.com if you’d like to try it out.

You can also view other metrics within CBP (e.g., page load time, engaged time per page (which can be a helpful indication of how well your content and site are doing), 30-day max of concurrent visitors, etc.).

They also have Labs, which contain some really interesting real-time visualizations, including access to your pages from around the world, concurrent by page title in descending order on a big board, a mosaic representation of traffic to your pages with visually bigger blocks meaning greater traffic, and so on.

Summary

There’s a lot you can play around with and try out when it comes to Chartbeat Publishing, especially with their free trial. Beyond that the plans do cost money every month, so you’ll have to figure out if one of them works for you.

CBP may or may not replace any of the tools you’re currently using but can definitely be a great addition and can seriously help free up some of the data for your content creators to use as they please to make better decisions faster.

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