This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues (2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have interesting plans ahead.
I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team + don't even know the team there.
It sure seems like a good fit... Charbeat focuses on real-time analytics while Google delays stats. Adding Chartbeat's real time capabilities would be interesting.
I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in "conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new interesting social aspect.
Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward performance over features.
Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is.
Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.
I've used it for several months. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics as some have implied. However, it is useful for getting early feedback on your marketing spend. For example, if you turn on an expensive Google SEM campaign, you can start watching the visitors in real time. I've used this to find negative keywords and block them instantly, without waiting for Google Analytics reports to catch up.
Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis invested in it.
Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's.
Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.
Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500 to $5,000 building it out.
The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original content.
After we double down you know what we do?
We double down again! :-)
I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again.
Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period.
It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
I see the benefits for Mahalo 100% but for the average business who doesn't make money spotting trends but instead from optimizing their site conversions it falls short of helping. Don't just show the user real-time data, show them real-time improvements they can make, now that would be cool.
For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.
So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.
Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.
I've been a fan of Chartbeat since day one, and I've been a consultant to the company for a year. I was thrilled to be invited as the first investor into the company, and the sky is limit for this startup.
I think chartbeat on a cool factor is high but on a useful factor it's low and therefore I passed. What web analytics needs is to go beyond just showing the data (real-time or not) into helping you understand WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE in order to IMPROVE your website objectives.
To be more specific:
Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like
- ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people
- tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem areas
- ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about and what is just taking up space on a page
- enabling exit interviews and real-time chat with users to collect feedback
- and on top of identifying problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve the problems.
Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.
Hey Jon, I'm the GM of chartbeat and totally appreciate your point. Everything you say is super appropriate for the traditional role of static analytics which was to look at usual behaviour on fairly persistent architectures over time and optimize that.
However, real-time analytics is almost the antithesis of this. It's focused on exploiting unusual behaviour now often across transient content. With this kind of content and the kind of user flows we are seeing more of across the sites we track (more spikes and troughs than ever before) you can seriously boost your traffic by reflecting user behaviour in the site and (as Jason suggested above) doubling down on what's got the edge in that moment. The page that's driving the majority of your traffic today might not have existed yesterday and might not be looked at tomorrow so purely trying to apply traditional analytics methods to it has diminished utility.
So you should totally continue to use traditional analytics for optimising the persistent architecture of your site (I'd highly recommend Kiss Metrics), but think about chartbeat as a complement to that, helping you adapt the transient content on your site to the flows of user behaviour.
There's a reason almost every major publisher has integrated chartbeat, some spending thousands of dollars on us a month, and it ain't just because we're pretty ;)
Hey Arctictony,
Thanks for the clarification. I agree your guys solution is perfect for media companies or any company that has fresh content coming in and needs to know which content is working. I think Jason's strategy is right on. I guess I'm just bitching because I can't find a "smart analytics" company, one that goes beyond the numbers to recommend solutions for companies like mine.
My company is http://www.MojoPages.com and we are constantly iterating the site to improve the user experience. Analytics companies like Kiss Metrics don't show the level of detail that we need to really understand the smartest improvement. We're forced to test, test, test and hope we're smart enough to figure out the problem and the optimal solution.
Imagine if an analytics company used the data from 1000's of clients to be able to suggest problem areas on your site. An example is if it could analyse your sign up flow and tell you if the location or color of your button or the amount of fields you had etc. was hurting your conversions and the data shows that if you made x,y and z change it would improve 20%. It would make life at a start-up a little easier and whoever creates this magical analytics company a little richer.
"Real-time analytics" is a contradiction in terms, imo. Analytics isn't day trading. Who takes action in response to data in "real time"? What does that even mean? Even Jason Calacanis says "...the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month..." (my emphasis). There's a lot of novelty value in blinking stats, but I concur with the general sentiment here that we need better analytics that makes sense of the data, not "real time" analytics that just pumps it out faster.
Chartbeat acts as an early warning system as to what those pages will be. so, if we are watching out big winners and suddenly see a new page jump into the top 50 pages we can double down on that THE MOMENT it spikes.
21 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadWe have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.
Hearing your thoughts on this will be interesting.
I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in "conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new interesting social aspect.
Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward performance over features.
Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.
Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's.
Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.
Last year we would see trends like StarCraft 2 come out, so we made pages like this:
http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrou...
Which we spend and make thousands of dollar on, and then double down by making videos on our Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA
Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500 to $5,000 building it out.
The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original content.
After we double down you know what we do?
We double down again! :-)
I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again.
When you got the nuts you pound it.
It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.
Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.
ChartBeat is Google Analytics on crack. :-)
To be more specific: Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like - ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people - tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem areas - ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about and what is just taking up space on a page - enabling exit interviews and real-time chat with users to collect feedback - and on top of identifying problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve the problems.
Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.
However, real-time analytics is almost the antithesis of this. It's focused on exploiting unusual behaviour now often across transient content. With this kind of content and the kind of user flows we are seeing more of across the sites we track (more spikes and troughs than ever before) you can seriously boost your traffic by reflecting user behaviour in the site and (as Jason suggested above) doubling down on what's got the edge in that moment. The page that's driving the majority of your traffic today might not have existed yesterday and might not be looked at tomorrow so purely trying to apply traditional analytics methods to it has diminished utility.
So you should totally continue to use traditional analytics for optimising the persistent architecture of your site (I'd highly recommend Kiss Metrics), but think about chartbeat as a complement to that, helping you adapt the transient content on your site to the flows of user behaviour.
There's a reason almost every major publisher has integrated chartbeat, some spending thousands of dollars on us a month, and it ain't just because we're pretty ;)
My company is http://www.MojoPages.com and we are constantly iterating the site to improve the user experience. Analytics companies like Kiss Metrics don't show the level of detail that we need to really understand the smartest improvement. We're forced to test, test, test and hope we're smart enough to figure out the problem and the optimal solution.
Imagine if an analytics company used the data from 1000's of clients to be able to suggest problem areas on your site. An example is if it could analyse your sign up flow and tell you if the location or color of your button or the amount of fields you had etc. was hurting your conversions and the data shows that if you made x,y and z change it would improve 20%. It would make life at a start-up a little easier and whoever creates this magical analytics company a little richer.
http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=0...
Chartbeat acts as an early warning system as to what those pages will be. so, if we are watching out big winners and suddenly see a new page jump into the top 50 pages we can double down on that THE MOMENT it spikes.
this is uber-powerful.