Chartbeat — Useful. Reliable. Simple.

We use Chartbeat across our network, both at the local and national level, to give use real-time results for which stories are driving high engagement. The real-time results give us an effective birds-eye view of where we should be devoting more resources, or, in the instance of low engagement, less.

From a user standpoint, Chartbeat helps identify wasted energy, which is a highly useful endeavor. If a two-minute video embedded in an article is getting the same engagement as a 10-minute video, there's no reason to waste the extra time needed to edit a 10-minute video when two will do.

I have not used Chartbeat's content testing tool, only because I didn't know it existed until this moment. But now that you mention it, I'll have to look into it. Chartbeat gives us a strong feel for how to time our social media response (which times of day are optimal engagement times, when's a good time to push something out again, etc.).

Reader loyalty lets us know when we're hitting our wheelhouse, or when we're dragging behind and need to pick up our game. Device type is somewhat useful in that it gives us a good idea of when something's askew (e.g., if we're usually at 60 percent mobile vs. 40 percent desktop, but today we're at 30 percent mobile, we could have a blind spot for something that needs our immediate attention). Concurrent users is a metric we use daily, repeatedly, for that real-time snapshot of how effective a story is.