Item: Chartbeat
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Chartbeat on a regular basis every day to monitor the analytics of our website, both in realtime and reflecting on the past performance of content using the historical dashboard. It's a crucial tool for our editorial team, and much more user-friendly (and well-presented) than Google Analytics. Our entire team is familiar with the product and encouraged to use it regularly, and we have daily quickfire reporting sessions every morning which are all carried out using data from Chartbeat.

Pros and Cons

Realtime data is updated much faster than other tools
All of the data in Chartbeat is presented clearly and very easy to understand
It's very easy to navigate around. You don't have to be a master of the invisible corridors to know where to find things!
Very easy to switch between live data and historical data
Good breakdown of different user types, ranging from loyal to casual
Traffic source data is well presented on the realtime dashboard

Traffic source data is less granular on the historical dashboard than it is in realtime
It can be hard to do a deeper report over a period of time, it tends to focus on top articles for any date range
You can't sort the live data page, if for example you wanted to do a quick check of the total page views for articles so far that day. You have to wait for the following day to run checks like that as a historical report

Return on Investment

It has given us a much better understanding of how to maximise search traffic. We put a big effort into improving our SEO performance in late 2023 and thanks to the clear way Chartbeat reports traffic sources (inc colour-coded graphs) we were able to quickly measure the 8-10% jump we made in search traffic. This would have been much more difficult to track so quickly using other tools
Chartbeat's excellent, and clear reporting of mobile vs desktop traffic, both in realtime and historical dashboards, has helped us focus any website design projects on the devices our audience are most likely to be using
We've increased our focus on 'engaged minutes' which is a favourite metric in Chartbeat. This has led us to regularly reformatting content so our longer articles are easier to digest. In some cases we've been able to double the average engaged time on article pages.

Real-Time Data

Hugely. This was our main reason for linking up with Chartbeat. We cover a live news sporting environment, so any lag in our data reporting is costing us time and affecting our position in a competitive market. Our editorial team has to be able to make decisions in an instant, not wait for the data to catch up so we can find out what's going on on our own website.

Usability

It's just so user-friendly. It's easy to navigate, and the data is very well presented. It's not dumbed-down, but its presentation is clearly put together with the idea that everyone should be able to understand it, not just developers who know their way around a complicated back end of any system. It also does a very good job of putting the important metrics front-and-centre, you don't have to go looking around too hard or know specific inputs and requests to find what you're looking for.

Content Optimization

The main thing we have been able to do is find ways to get people to engage for longer with our longer content. We are a specialist publication which often focuses on depth, so we spend a lot of time working out how we can make people stay on articles that could be up to or over 1500 to 2000 words. We've been able to experiment with formats, and different ways of keeping the content long but breaking it up so it's easier to digest, and we can clearly see on a daily basis that this has made a noticeable difference.

Engagement Metrics

We want to make sure that we are catering to many times of fan, not just the super hardcore who form a large part of our most engaged audience. So the breakdown of reader loyalty is important because it quickly enables us to see if we are bringing in enough new users by making sure our content is expert but still accessible. Device type has been very handy for making sure our content is well optimised for mobile experience. Recirculation is particularly interesting - on our busiest days we want to make sure this is as high as possible, because we are publishing a lot of content, but if our recirculation is low, then we know we're not doing a good enough job of surfacing the depth of our offering to our audience.

Alternatives Considered

Google Analytics

Google Analytics has gradually become much more difficult to use, and much slower in its realtime reporting. It was the changes that came in with Google Analytics 4 that gave us the final push to work with Chartbeat - a product some of us were already familiar with from previous jobs. Things are just much harder to find in GA, and when time is always tight you can't afford to spend a long time looking for particular data - it should be quick and easy to locate.

Key Insights

Do you think Chartbeat delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Chartbeat's feature set?

Yes

Did Chartbeat live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Chartbeat go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Chartbeat again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, Google Drive, Ghost

Likelihood to Recommend

The main point of benefit is the realtime data. This is vital to our team as we are publishing a lot of content per day, so we have a busy homepage to manage and it's important to know which content is performing well. We also like to get an understanding as quickly as possible - which Chartbeat offers - of where traffic is coming from. Often we will see an example where a page is getting high traffic from Google, for example, and we know that might not need to be placed so prominently on the homepage because the traffic is arriving to us externally anyway. Without that depth of understanding what is performing best and why - updated immediately, unlike in Google Analytics now - our homepage would not be as well optimised for users coming to us direct.

Users and Roles

10 - This is our website editorial team, who create and manage our web content to allow us to provide near-round the clock coverage of the sport we are dedicated to. They are using the product both for its realtime data to help them make up to the minute decisions, and to reflect daily on the performance of content once the historical dashboard updates.

Support Headcount Required

1 - We only really have one person who liaises with Chartbeat from our side, and that person (me) also fields any queries or requests for help from less experienced users of the product that we have inside our business. If anything is too complex to work out ourselves, we go back to Chartbeat directly.

Business Processes Supported

Live analytics reporting
Daily 24-hour reports that are sent to my team's inboxes
Traffic source data

Innovative Uses

We've been able to adjust the formats of our content to improve the dwell times on our pages.
We were able to benchmark the improvements we made in SEO much faster than I expected. The data was so clear so quickly that something we thought might take months to make a difference was noticeable in a week or two
We have a clearer understanding of how search traffic is reaching us, which prevents us from misunderstanding what the most important content on our homepage is for our direct users

Future Planned Uses

We understand they have an integration of Google Search Console data coming. A user-friendly version of this data would be another big step up
I hope that they will allow deeper reporting than just the top 50 pages in future. We also like to focus on what isn't working, as well as what is, on our site

Likelihood to Renew

At any time of day, someone in our team is using Chartbeat and getting valuable insights from it. It has helped foster a better culture of analytics reporting within our business, and to stop using it now would halt that momentum, I am sure of it. I think people in our team were put off by other tools such as Google Analytics being hard to understand unless you were really familiar with it. Everyone was able to get up to speed with Chartbeat much more easily.

Would definitely recommend Chartbeat - 100%

Overall Satisfaction with Chartbeat