How I use Chartbeat all day every day
August 19, 2020

How I use Chartbeat all day every day

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chartbeat

Chartbeat is used across the whole organization to monitor the performance of all content across individual sites, groups of sites, individual authors, teams; different referrers like social media, search engines, direct to site, apps, email, etc. It's also used to monitor homepage performance showing how users interact with and around the site.

Pros

  • Engagement time with articles, showing you how long readers are staying with the article.
  • Breakdown of where traffic is coming from, which helps to see what kind of reader prefers which kind of story (eg what is a "Facebook" story).
  • How readers are moving round the site, which articles are being picked up internally.

Cons

  • The mobile app could be more detailed, it could show page views and more information on referrers.
  • Email, apps and IM could be separated to make the data more granular.
  • The heads up display often drops off the site.
  • Chartbeat has helped inform our content choices: what to write, what not to write, and when to publish.
We can see how long readers spend with our content, work out what is an average, and from that, work out what is a high level of engagement, and from that, set some benchmarks for what we deem to be high impact content. Seeing how many people are on our site at any one time allows us to understand the behavior of our audience and time content appropriately.
It is easy to use however the range of functions means it's easy to forget what some of them do from time to time, but there's a helpful guide if you need a reminder!
Headline testing is a really interesting and valuable feature which has enabled us to make an educated decision about headlines, rather than basing how we write them on performances of previous headlines or instinct for what would work. Recirculation metrics are useful to determine whether the site is underperforming and whether content can be improved to retain readers on the site.
Concurrents metrics obviously have a huge impact on the type of content we produce as it tells us what our audience likes to read. Device type gives us insight into homepage management on different devices; reader loyalty has helped us make informed decisions about the kind of content we should produce to attract new readers and what we should continue producing to retain our returning readers.
I have used Google Analytics' realtime tool but I thought it was less user friendly than Chartbeat and did not measure site performance in the same way. The concurrents number was much higher due to how it was measured which I felt gave a less reliable picture than Chartbeat.
It works well in a digital newsroom where you're constantly monitoring the performance of your website. I always have Chartbeat open throughout the day and I can check it on the app if I'm away from my laptop. If you don't need real-time web analytics for your business, it would be less appropriate.

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