ChartBeat is a real-time analytics platform for websites of all kinds, but particularly useful for businesses, as it provides clear data of what is happening on a site at any minute of the day. ChartBeat is already used by power-players like Groupon, Gawker, The Onion, Starbucks and many others – industry leaders that make use of every possible tool to gather business intelligence about their online performance. And ChartBeat is brilliant in providing just that.
The data is graphic and visual, providing detailed information for the top most-read pages on a site, including how many visitors read a story at a given moment in time; how many active visits are on the site; what the reader engagement is on a site (reading visitors, writing visitors and idle visitors); site performance, including user page load time and server load time; traffic sources (including keyword phrases); and user location. ChartBeat also alerts site admins of possible down-times, and monitors for how long a site stayed down.
ChartBeat makes sense of user behaviors and performance data.
When analyzing the data, you can filter by any criteria (active visits, engagement, traffic sources) then go deeper, filter by URL and understand exactly what users make on your site, how long they stay there and so on.
Unlike Google Analytics, that provides only estimates of users’ time on site, ChartBeat actually makes sense: it tells you whether users are actively reading your site, or they have it open in a browser tab for later. The platform also tells you when users are typing something on your site – comments or search queries, for instance. The data helps you understand what users like to read on your site, how they use it, what topics are more successful and why, and so on.
In other words, ChartBeat is a brilliant tool to understand user behavior, even better than Google Analytics, for the simple reason that while traditional analytics shows how long users stay on a site, ChartBeat knows which sessions are active at any given moment and what the users are doing. A more clear infographic to help you understand what ChartBeat is measuring, below:
ChartBeat versus traditional analytics
As any analytics platform, ChartBeat can be shared with your colleagues, for a collaborative understanding of the data. You can track up to five sites, with a plan that only costs $9.95. There are other plans as well, for agencies and publishers who need to track more sites and sub-domains.