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Here's How Chartbeat Informed My Content Strategy
July 16, 2021

Here's How Chartbeat Informed My Content Strategy

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

Overall Satisfaction with Chartbeat

Each brand uses Chartbeat, but I can only speak to how my brand uses it specifically. Everyone on editorial and social has Chartbeat open all day long to see what's working and where we can tweak headlines to help get more eyeballs on those stories. We especially love the big board where we can see all the content performing at one time and historically when we've been in the office, I cast it to the large TVs above our desks.
  • Real-time data - to see what our audience is engaging with to help inform future stories.
  • Having a clear and modern version of what a return visitor is (using your 5-second tracker); this is important because it gives us a clear understanding of who is reading our content and for how long—it helps us define our loyalists and discoverers.
  • Easy snapshot of referrers to see where traffic is coming from.
  • Source of traffic needs improvement. Search and social make sense, but "internal" and "links" is a grey area. It would be helpful to define those with an organization and provide an information icon so users can easily remember what each of those buckets is tracking.
  • More ways to customize the real-time board. For example, with video content, that's great that I can see a user has started a video, but what is the completion rate, was that only on O&O or can that track Facebook, too?
  • Would like to see demo (age) information included as a way to slice the data so I can see what's working with my older and younger demo.
  • We have found small trends that have become huge successes for us.
  • We can quickly identify issues with new content.
  • We can see older content popping and quickly remind us to update.
This is such a critical feature because it has helped in so many ways. First, we can see what's working at any given moment and therefore have a sense of what's trending. Secondly, we can see what to put money behind. If something is taking off on social, we can boost it and capture new audience, but if something is taking off on newsletter we can try to promote it on social to see if we can't make that piece of content go viral. Lastly, we can see where to go in and add affiliate or related links quickly if we feel that the story is lacking.
It really is super easy to use. I feel like the engineers spent equal amounts of time on creating a tool that captures and splices data and on the user interface and how someone will interact with every link. Oftentimes, you don't get that—engineers often forget that their end user isn't a data scientist or a software engineer so using a tool they built needs to be easy to navigate.
Yes, we've used the engagement metrics to test our content and improve performance by tweaking words in headlines—A/B testing headlines, promoting stories that are doing well, and even promoting content on other platforms, especially new content when we see it do well on a particular platform. We see this last one all the time, when a new piece of content starts to spike on Google and then we immediately post to Facebook because both platforms have social listening tools that are picking up signals from one another.
Chartbeat’s reader engagement metrics has influenced the type of content we publish by giving us data insights that we can use to make informed decisions on what to create next. A great example of this is content we've created around small town travel. We saw our first small town story take off on Chartbeat and so we decided to create another story. When that story took off, too we knew we were onto something. So, we continued to create additional small town destination content, paying attention to the concurrents and engaged time to help us measure success.
Other products like Chartbeat that I've used are Parse.ly, GA, and Omniture. Parse.ly is the only tool, in my opinion, that offers more real-time data, but the interface is lacking and isn't as intuitive as Chartbeat.

Do you think Chartbeat delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Chartbeat's feature set?

Yes

Did Chartbeat live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Chartbeat go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Chartbeat again?

Yes

This provides a great snapshot as to what's working at any giving moment. I've always liked how easy Chartbeat's interface is to use and makes it fairly easy to click around to find new pieces of data. I also really love the headline testing on our homepage so we can see real-time how slight changes to word can help a story take off.