The newsroom tool which *really* leads to audience transformation
October 02, 2020

The newsroom tool which *really* leads to audience transformation

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chartbeat

Chartbeat is used by our organization to track what readers are reading on our news sites, in real-time. This helps us to understand which content resonates with readers instantly, and which content needs more work to land with readers. We are also able to understand which stories work best with new readers, which ones attract loyal readers, and the sources they come from. It enables newsrooms to make decisions involving reader behavior in real-time.
  • Instant insight for newsrooms: What are readers reading, on what platform, how long are they staying?
  • Headline testing: Allows us to try multiple versions of the 'sell' for the story to understand what interests different sorts of readers
  • Segmentation of audience: Allows us to understand not only where readers come from (search, social, direct, etc.) but also how loyal they are and how long they stay
  • Proper engagement time: Too often our industry obsesses on dwell time, but Chartbeat's active engaged time gives us a true sense of how long we really engage people for
  • Simple actions: For example, the Chartbeat overlay tells us where people on average leave a story, so it helps us take actions quickly
  • Wealth of data, but sometimes hard to extract in detail historically
  • Driving efficiency in content creation--understanding what people want to read
  • Identifying new content opportunities, in turn driving revenue
  • Key for organic digital transformation
It changes the way newsrooms work. Good newsrooms don't just publish, they understand they need to keep working on the "sell" of the story. Chartbeat helps us do that--showing us straight away how well a story is landing with readers. Have we exhausted all the places to promote it? Are readers sticking with it? Which headline is working best? Chartbeat answers all of these.
Very strong, simple interface. Could do with more options to filter the real-time data, and greater opportunities to access the historical data. But you can get a lot out of it in just a few minutes and build from there.
Yes. The engagement metrics (engaged time) are critical measures in our newsrooms, allowing us to understand whether people are sticking with a story. We also have benchmarks to understand stories which high perform in these areas, and then use advanced analysis within Chartbeat to ask why.
It's easy to know which stories are spiking because you can see that everywhere. Much harder is the impact a story has with loyal readers. Chartbeat's loyal reader metric is simple to understand and enables us to cut through headline scale and understand whether we're serving our loyal audiences - and what interests our loyal audiences.
We have looked at other products, including Parse.ly, in the past. Chartbeat is closer to our needs.
Chartbeat is a very strong go-to for newsrooms across the world that want to place audiences at the heart of what they do.

It's easy to be overwhelmed by data, and also easy to dismiss it too quickly. Chartbeat gets the balance right - drawing on a lot of data to tell us what we need to know about readers to better serve them.