chartbeat

• 5 guys,
• More than 1.2 million concurrent visitors being tracked right now,
• More than 2,500 paying customers,
• And three million dollars from the best investors on the planet…

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we have raised $3m in Series A funding from Index Ventures and some of the best investors in the world including:

• O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures
• Jeff Clavier
• Freestyle Capital
• Lowercase Capital
• Founders Collective
• SV Angel
• Lerer Ventures
• Jason Calacanis
• Josh Stylman & Peter Hershberg
• Betaworks
• Alex Zubillaga
• Fritz Lanman

It’s an incredible show of faith in our team and what we have built thus far and we’d like to thank everyone for their support. We’re going to take this team of hardcore C coders, genius Data scientists and all-round Python hackers and build Chartbeat into the ‘Intel Inside’ of websites everywhere.

Chartbeat: the quick guide

Chartbeat is a real-time analytics service used by  more than 2,500 paying customers including Time.com, Gawker Media, Groupon, Threadless, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times to make their sites more adaptive in real-time. To see an example of what chartbeat can do when integrated into a site take a look at Gawker’s new beta site where Editors use chartbeat to make real-time decisions about what stories to show where and even reflect that data back to their users. There’s a 30-day free trial so there’s really nothing stopping you seeing what chartbeat can do for you.

There’s been some celebrations around chartbeat today as we can now say that at any one moment during the day we are listening to the pulse of more than one million people across the web. You can see the current number of people chartbeat is interacting with by going to our front page.

As I know from painful experience with my personal site, for the vast majority of sites on the web the average number of people on that site at any one time is approximately zero, so this is a big milestone for us. We’ve been lucky to work with some awesome sites and companies since we launched a little over a year ago and in particular I want to call out a few chartbeat users who’ve gone above and beyond with feedback, encouragement and subscription fees! Thank you, Gawker media, Fast Company and Inc, Time.com, The New York Times, AOL, Forbes, Deltatre, Groupon and Threadless.

Thanks also to companies like Talking Points Memo, the Onion and the Chicago Tribune for putting the API through its paces and using chartbeat to make their sites automatically adapt in real time. We’re really very fond of you all!

We’re working hard on the evolution of chartbeat right now (and hiring!) and we plan on continuing to show just what you can do when you take data real time.

Although chartbeat has always emphasized the value of real-time data, we know that past performance is really important for understanding what today’s numbers mean. It’s why we brought historical data into the new dashboard, showing how today is doing compared to last week, and how a given referrer, page, or other metric has trended over time.

Many of you have contacted us asking for programmatic access to this trend data for your own purposes, and in fact chartbeat has a philosophy of trying to release all the APIs we use to build our own interface. Although the APIs are still provisional, we’ve decided to release an early version for you to try out and provide feedback. You’ll find them on api.chartbeat.com: data_series and day_data_series.

As always, please feel free to offer suggestions or ask questions to via support emails or in the Google Group. We encourage anyone using our APIs to join the Group, which we will also use to announce any deprecations or changes.

Another note for the coders out there: our change last week to support bookmarking and back buttons of specific views in the dashboard has an interesting side effect. You can now build links straight into the dashboard for a particular page from your own internal tools. For example, you can use http://chartbeat.com/demo/#Page::/a_vc/mba-mondays/ to link straight to that page’s date on Fred Wilson’s dashboard.

The chartbeat dashboard recently underwent its first major revision since launching a year ago. In this post, betaworks’ User Experience lead Neil Wehrle will share some of the process and design decisions that got us here.

The team has a strong vision for chartbeat, and to bolster our vision I led some quick-and-clean research into how current and prospective users view chartbeat. Our plan included heuristic evaluation, in-person usability reviews, and group-based cognitive walkthroughs, all to provide insight and momentum. The team arrived at a set of first principles to guide development, and we quickly settled in an iterative design-build-test cycle, where the fidelity of each step evolved as we built out the site. I’ve highlighted some of the core principles and selected design decisions below:

Structure the site around user goals
chartbeat is a tool for front-line workers, not just internal analytics teams. We designed the layout around a set of use cases, so users could walk through the data in a logical fashion, understand causality, and take action. The triad of panels at top allows users to understand “how many people, how did they get here, and what are they looking at?” in a snap. We also heard our users love the kinetic nature of chartbeat, so we extended that a bit with a Matrix-like stream of raw hits in the right-most column.

Data should be appropriately dense, clear and actionable
Data should be rich and deep, without compromising ease of use and clarity. As an example, the tree map in v.1 was challenging for users – they liked the intent, but it was difficult to interpret. Sites with extremely low or high traffic or with few pages skewed the chart so that it was impossible to analyze. We decided to use a small range of fixed sizes, ensuring the display of most pages, and using dots to represent visitors. Larger numbers and page titles increase legibility, while isolating the page modules with white space makes it easier to read them as units. We also standardized and gave meaning to the range of colors we used, so users can more associate meaning across the panels.

Everything should be on a single page
A key interaction design challenge chartbeat faces is letting users drill into richer data whithout resorting to traditional hierarchical navigation schemes. We came up with the notion of “pivoting” around a selected data element, where the entire page changes to reflect just that element. This way, chartbeat can serve as a site-level analysis tool and easily shift to isolate a page with a single click.

Use historical data as context, but keep it a real-time tool
Users love the real-time aspect of chartbeat data, but a unanimous request is to provide some context to what they’re viewing. Some amount of historical data was in the previous version, hidden behind a tab at the top of the page. Hidden, too, was a powerful replay feature that lets users isolate events and walk through it (“Tivo for your website” as Tony likes to say). By bringing the replay to the fore, we signaled to users that historical data is available by showing a trend chart. When users pivot on data, we also show a thin historical chart that can be expanded for more detail.

We’ve been doing some followup visits with users to understand their long-term usage and how it is fitting into workflows. One big finding has been that the clarity of the data brought many new features to the foreground for users, giving them new reasons to use chartbeat. We hope that our customers have enjoyed this revision and let us know what we can do to keep improving it.

We’re excited to release our Beta version of chartbeat v2. We’ve spent the last few months talking to many of you about what you want from chartbeat and we’ve tried to build a lot of that into this version. We can’t wait to find out what you think.

First up, you’ll notice that chartbeat has been completely redesigned. We wanted to keep that single-page simplicity you’ve told us you love, but enable you to do more with it. Now with a single click you can drill down into the data you want and understand so much more about what’s happening on your site. The easiest way to really experience chartbeat beta is to click on the beta link on your dashboard, or (if you’re not a chartbeat user yet) check out our demo site here. However, we’ve also made this video to outline what the new chartbeat can do (best to watch in HD and full screen):

What’s New?

The first thing you might notice is that there’s a new toolbar at the top that not only shows you the pattern of your traffic over the last day, week or month, but also enables you to pick any moment in time and replay it. You can take another look at that traffic spike and understand its viral path across the web from referrer to referrer. This is Tivo for your website.

It’s also easy to drill down into the data on chartbeat without getting lost. Simply click on the data point that interests you, and the entire site will immediately pivot around that point to show you what you want to know. Click on a particular story and you’ll see every panel reflect information relating to that story alone, click on a particular referrer and you can immediately see which pages they are hitting and even the history of that referrer.

You can go one better by clicking on any of the panels on the left and see their information translated across your top pages. Want see which pages are driving new visitors vs returning, which pages are getting the most engagement or which pages are slowest to load? All it takes is one click.

This version is still in Beta (for best results try using this in Chrome) and we’ll be making lots of changes as we push this forward, so please do give us your feedback and we’ll do our best to make chartbeat even more of what you want.

Chartbeat has made a few changes to its plans and pricing that we’d like to tell you about. These changes won’t affect current users, but will apply to everyone who signs up from now on.

Chartbeat has been handling larger and larger sites recently with events like the iPad launch requiring us to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors to a single site. More and more sites have asked us to handle traffic beyond the limits set on the standard account.

To make this easier we’re moving from a one-size-fits all account to different levels of accounts that can handle your site no matter what the traffic. The standard account will still be just $9.95 a month and will enable you to run five sites on chartbeat. We’ve set the traffic cap for this account at a cumulative total of 1,000 concurrent users (that’s 1,000 people on your sites at the same time), and if you manage to hit that cap you are doing really really well!

Large sites can choose from a range of plans to fit their traffic needs going up to 15,000 concurrent users. If you need to go above even that level we suggest you get in touch!

If you have any questions at all about the changes and how they might affect you, please do email us and we’ll get right back to you.

When people initially think about “real-time analytics” they often think of it as “like traditional analytics, only faster.” But what’s often missed is the transformative way chartbeat measures visitor activity: it gives you the data you need faster, but it also makes that data much richer.

With a traditional service like Google Analytics, a user sends a “ping” to the service when they first arrive on the page, and, sometimes, whey they click on links. From this data, it’s possible to count the number of page views in a period of time. But measures of how long users remain on the page are just guesses.

In contrast, with chartbeat, one user sends repeated pings, as frequently as every 15 seconds, to say “I’m still here, and this is what I’m doing.” Are they actively reading your site, or do they have it open in a browser tab for later? Are they writing something, maybe a comment or search? Are they scrolling down and engaging with the content or not getting much further than the headline?

The chartbeat method of counting provides a richer sense of how many qualified and retained views you’re getting, rather just raw visits to your web site. Our data gives a more accurate accounting of time on page and a better sense of how much of that time was actually spent looking at and interacting with your page. This is information that that can be valuable in optimizing your website, improving your marketing, or selling more advertising.

Why your chartbeat numbers don’t match your traditional analytics numbers

All analytics services measure data in different ways and reconciling them can be difficult, but doing so can be even more difficult when trying to reconcile real-time analytics with traditional analytics. Knowing how many users are on your site at any given time is qualitatively different from knowing how many page loads occurred during a given period of time. The same 5 page views in an hour could be 1 concurrent view if users do not remain engaged and leave your site, or 5 concurrent views if those users remain engaged and stick around.

This is illustrated in the diagram above. While traditional measurement only knows that there were 5 visits between 10:00 and 11:00, chartbeat knows which sessions are active at any given moment and what they’re doing. When you load the dashboard or view your history, you see slices in time, some with 2 users present at once (10:05), some with 4 users present (10:00).

So what’s better, page views or concurrent views? We think they both have their place. But it’s important to understand that these are two very different perspectives on visitor behavior, and there can be valuable insight in the differences. If chartbeat shows a larger percent of traffic on some page than Google does, that page may be holding users’ attention for longer. If chartbeat shows more traffic coming from direct than search, it may mean that users coming via Twitter are more likely to linger than hits from web search. Viewing this behavior from the angles of both traditional and real-time analytics will give you far greater insight into what’s really happening on your site and how to improve it than any one tool alone.

The Apple iPad announcement was not just a big day for Apple, it was a huge day for the gadget blogs. Chartbeat is under the hood of a number of the largest gadget blogs including gizmodo, gdgt and techland and every site saw exploding traffic. Gizmodo saw an incredible 110,000 people simultaneously on their live blog alone with tens of thousands more on the site itself.

It’s in these increasingly common peaks and troughs of the social web that real-time analytics can really help site owners to exploit the opportunity. Gdgt founder Peter Rojas noted that: ‘During yesterday’s Apple event we used Chartbeat to track how people were moving between the live blog and the rest of the site. It was amazing — and incredibly useful — to be able to see the surge of users and how they moved around the in real-time.’ Gdgt was able to adapt its site to the flows of traffic as they happened in real-time to maximize the opportunity that presented itself.

For Gawkermedia CTO Thomas Plunkett, there was an additional benefit: ‘By providing key information in real-time, we have a much more precise understanding of the traffic we must support as we add features to our next generation liveblog platform.’ Gawkermedia’s ability to track exactly what was happening on their site, down to how long the page took to load on each visitors browser, when traffic took off and then use Chartbeat’s tivo-like functions to replay afterwards what happened, meant that they will be better prepared for the next spike.

Trying to deal with these kind of events only using traditional analytics is a little like having a fire alarm on a 24-hour delay. It’s good to know that your house was on fire yesterday, but it’s a little late to be able to do anything about it. It’s real-time analytics tools like chartbeat that give you the tools to take advantage and make the most of these kinds of spikes.

We’re happy to announce that Chartbeat is now providing real-time analytics to Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service and major webhosting service DreamHost! From now on TypePad bloggers will be able to access Chartbeat for just $6.95/mo after their free trial, a saving of 30%. DreamHost have gone even further and have integrated Chartbeat analytics into the heart of their service.

You will be able to see how many people are on your site, where they came from and what content they are engaging with directly within DreamHost and then be able to click through to your chartbeat account for the full picture. We’re really excited about partnering with two such wonderful companies and we’re looking forward to seeing just what we can do with them.

As you may have read, Google Analytics recently beta-launched asynchronous tracking – an enhancement that we also made to Chartbeat back in October.  The main reason for our switch (as well as Google’s) was to minimize the impact that our code has on your site’s load time.

With asynchronous tracking, the code has been modified to wait until your site has completely finished loading before fetching and running the JavaScript.  This way your site can perform at optimum speed while Chartbeat continues to do what it does best: provide you with sleek & up to the minute real-time analytics. Now that asynchronous tracking has been added, you can use Google Analytics as a complement to Chartbeat without being slowed down.

So, what are your thoughts on Google’s switch to asynchronous tracking?  Have you already installed the updated script?  If so, have you seen a noticeable difference in site speed?  Leave a comment or message us on Twitter (@chartbeat) with your thoughts.