Item: Chartbeat
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to identify digital content performance, story trends and conversion tracking. We also use it to share engagement metrics with journalists and highlight potential action items for the newsroom. Headsup display assists our digital team with realtime curation of our homepage and the API helps us populate a trending story widget on our site.

Pros and Cons

performance tracking of trending stories
highlighting audience segments (subscriber, guest)
highlighting social traffic - what social referrals are important
track conversions and conversion path

Monthly reports -can we get a dashboard so we can better manage these?
more than 12 months of data would be nice - like 24 months is probably sufficient
user path is a bit vague based on the types of reporting available

Return on Investment

We don't have any hard numbers on Chartbeat affecting sales or subscriptions.
We share daily Chartbeat numbers in our morning newsroom meetings to understand what stories might need a follow on

Real-Time Data

It's helpful to understand the realtime flow if we need to to update our homepage to offer the trending content in different ways, prompting push alerts on trending content or understanding spike referrals if they come out of the blue.

Usability

Site is pretty intuitive. I have not had to search for much of anything in Chartbeat and am able to find what I need quickly.

Content Optimization

We have used the testing to improve headlines as well as prompted content decisions.

Engagement Metrics

It is in process- we are using the Chartbeat metrics in reporter meetings and story planning. I don't know if any single metric has influenced decisions - we often use it as backup for strategy as well.

Alternatives Considered

Google Analytics

Much easier to use and understand than GA4. We tested Marfeel, but felt Chartbeat was so good there was no reason to change.

I still feel like our audit is still based on GA4 so we do have to still pay attention to that.

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

Pushly, Google Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

Is very helpful for sites with a decent amount of content. It's less useful for our smaller publication. I also don't know if I could enable it on our app - I've never asked about that. We don't have good visibility for user journey between our multiple digital channels. Chartbeat's competitor Marfeel touts some SEO features that would be nice to have - things like keyword suggestions or keyword trends could help the newsroom develop content suited to those suggestions. I don't see our newsroom doing that however. We would be better served by doing more content optimization of what we currently write about and make use of the headline tester more. The problem is that reporters don't have time to use these tools and we only have two digital team members who would potentially use it at this time.

monitoring user engagement
noting trending content
conversion optimization

Innovative Uses

the api to populate trending articles on our site

Likelihood to Renew

The only reason we would discontinue use is if we were forced to cut technology costs.

Quality product, delivers on promise

Overall Satisfaction with Chartbeat