Metrics that Matter & the Death of the Page View
Page views are a pain in the ass. It’s the metric that lies behind so many of the bad design decisions on the web. Time on page is too. The way it’s been measured has often been more akin to a finger in the air than the solid metrics we expect. Neither really take into consideration how users are actually viewing information – from social to mobile – or at least not well.
As Lewis DVorkin states in his latest Forbes piece, “the page view engagement metric of the last decade served its purpose.” He’s right. It did. But now, RIP Page Views. It’s time for us to move on and start using metrics that truly matter to your site’s performance – those are the metrics that tell the full story of your content.
That full story is not told in a page view. Sure, it might tell you that you’re awesome at driving traffic to your site, but beyond that…? What kind of traffic? The right kind, the kind what will come back, the kind that will genuinely engage, share, and chat about you?
We, the Chartbeat crew, are pretty certain the future lies in engagement. Engagement – or specifically a new metric we’re rolling out called engaged minutes – is all about how and how long someone is actually, actively engaged with your content. It’s about knowing precisely what that user is engaging with and how. For instance, is this page linkbait, driving clicks but no engagement? Or is this piece of content a slow burner that’s hidden behind a bad headline, so readers have a tough time finding it, but when they do, they love and engage with it? If so, it might be time to change how you position and promote those stories as a result.
And that’s the point, right? To take action and make decisions. That’s why you’re using real-time data, to adapt and react to who is engaging with your content and how, whether those actions are immediate or longer-term. And you can’t take meaningful action on page views.
So, please pack up your things, page views. Engaged minutes is on its way to usurp your throne.
Newsbeat: Introducing Benchmarking for stories
Real-time analytics like Newsbeat enables you to understand what’s happening on your site right now, but it can still be hard to understand whether an article is performing better or worse than it should be. Today, we’re trying to make that easier by introducing benchmarking for articles. Our algorithms model the typical path of a story published at that time on your site over the first 12 hours of its life cycle and give you an instant understanding of whether your article is performing above or below that typical path. Simply go to the performance tab and click on an article (our algorithms automatically ignore landing pages) and you’ll get a sense of how that article is doing.
In the example above, the red line showing actual performance is just under what would be typical performance for a story on that site published at that time; it is underperforming against the benchmark. In the example below, the red line showing actual article performance is beating the benchmark of typical article performance; it’s a great story!
When looking at your top 10 stories you should expect them to beat typical performance by quite a bit; that’s why they are your top ten stories! However, as you delve into stories below the top rank you’ll see their performance converge with typical and instantly be able to see when an unexpected event like a link from Drudge or spike from social moves you away from that typical performance. Once you’ve published a story, come back to our dashboard and see if it is out performing your standard articles. If it’s falling short, make sure you’re taking every opportunity to promote it through your site and social media. When a story is exceeding expectations, then it might be time to give it some homepage love, or understand how you can apply this success to all your other content.
We’re constantly working on improving the models, incorporating more factors, and providing more context around the data to ensure that you can extract as much value from our product as possible. Please email us anytime at: support@chartbeat.com, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re headed to the ONA!
The people in the newsroom are the heart and soul of newsbeat, so we’re really excited to be heading to Boston for the ONA conference this weekend.
Tony Haile (our newly minted CEO!) and I are going to be attending sessions to learn more about what makes great news organizations tick, showing off some of the new things we’ve got in the works, and reaching out for your feedback on newsbeat (and chartbeat!).
We’ve also proposed a session for the ONA unconference about the move to a real-time newsroom – what works, what doesn’t, and how newsrooms are adapting to a real-time news cycle. You can check out the details here and then vote for the session if you’d like to join us!
Tony and I will be at the conference tomorrow and Saturday, so feel free to grab us if you’d like to chat. Or send me an email at dawn@chartbeat.com if you’d rather schedule time to talk. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas!
Celebrating your chartbeat triumphs
Even we at chartbeat aren’t immune to it.
Immediately after the earthquake rattled the Northeast a couple of weeks ago, everyone at chartbeat HQ dropped what they were doing to gather around the “total total” dial we display on a big monitor in the center of our office. The “total total” shows cumulative traffic across every site running chartbeat and we all wanted to know, “Would the earthquake news drive enough traffic to break our previous record?”
As people across the east coast, and then across the rest of the country, went online to find out what happened, traffic to chartbeat sites went through the roof. In less than 10 minutes, we zoomed past our previous all-time high.
As we cheered, did the requisite high fives (we really like high fives around here), and tweeted links to our new record-breaking dial, it made me think of other people who have shared similar chartbeat triumphs.
From new 30-day traffic highs, to watching a product launch take off, it’s exciting to see pictures of companies gathered around their dashboards or screenshots of dials, dashboards, and big boards being shared with the world via Twitter, tumblr, and flickr.
To continue in this spirit of celebration, we’ve started a gallery to capture these publicly shared chartbeat moments. Head over to http://gallery.chartbeat.com to check out how people are displaying chartbeat in their offices and sharing their chartbeat triumphs with the world.
And if you have your chartbeat data displayed in your office or want to share a photo of one of your exciting chartbeat moments, we’d love to add it to the gallery! Just send me an email at dawn@chartbeat.com or post it on Twitter.
Making new vs. returning visits more human centric
chartbeat
We think it’s important to measure humans rather than clicks, which often means a departure from traditional analytics. Up until Sunday, we considered a new visitor anyone who was on the first page of their first visit to your site in the past 30 days.
This was useful for identifying which pages were most effectively driving new traffic but caused issues when trying to understand the broader behavior of new visitors.
We wanted to take this type of behavior into account, so for people who are coming to your site for the first time in the past 30 days, we’re now counting them as “new” for the first 30 minutes they spend on your site, regardless of how many pages they have visited.
newsbeat
After this time, they will be considered a “returning” visit, which will also be true if they visit your site again within 30 days. If they haven’t revisited your site in 30 days, the clock resets and they’re treated as a new visitor again.
This change means you might see a slight increase in the percentage of new visits on your chartbeat or newsbeat dashboard. If you have alerts set up for new visits, there’s a chance this increase will trigger an alert for you. Please let us know if you need help managing the alerts. (For all of you who are thinking “What’s an alert? Chartbeat has alerts?” don’t worry! You can explore and set up customized alerts through your chartbeat alerts tab or newsbeat settings page.)
As always, we really want to hear what you think. Send us your feedback, thoughts, and examples of how you use new vs. returning metrics, on our site or elsewhere.
The EU cookie directive and chartbeat
We’ve had a few of our European clients ask about the new EU cookie directive and how this affects their site’s use of chartbeat or newsbeat.
The EU law, which requires that all users are asked for consent before using any non-essential cookies, will have an impact on the cookies served by chartbeat.
Currently, chartbeat uses two cookies. One cookie (_chartbeat2) is used to register if a person has visited the domain before (to calculate “new vs returning” users). The other (_SUPERFLY_nosample) is used only if you go over your plan’s traffic limit. At that point the cookie is set and will disable the beacon from that visitor for one hour. The _chartbeat2 cookie is valid for 30 days. The _SUPERFLY_nosample cookie is valid for one hour.
For more information about the chartbeat code, please see our docs page.
Newsbeat: Introducing Spike Alerts
- Predicted increase in traffic. This is to avoid sending alerts for expected, and therefore, uninteresting, increases. For example, an article posted at 2 a.m. that starts to pick up traffic at 9 a.m. is not that interesting.
- Rate of increase in traffic
- Absolute increase in traffic
Tools for sharing your data with the world
Displaying data about your site, on your site, has become part of the standard user experience – from the number of Facebook and Twitter shares to the total page views on every article.
Business Insider's Engage-O-Meter
Last Wednesday, Business Insider took it one step further when they launched the Engage-O-Meter, a customized chartbeat-powered widget showing how many people are on their site right now.
They also made their chartbeat dashboard accessible to the public.
By opening up their real-time data, Business Insider joins a group of other chartbeat users who are showing off their numbers:
- Before It’s News and politics.ie are using the chartbeat API to show how many active visits are on their site
- Midi Libre is displaying both active visits and traffic to top stores at the top of their home page
- Hark.com has a real-time feed of where their users are arriving from and what they’re reading
Active Visits
The Active Visits Dial shows the total number of visitors across your entire site with the classic chartbeat gauge. You can customize color and size, refresh rate, and the widget label. Please note that you will need to proxy the api request to use this, so it’s a little more developer intensive than the rest of the widgets.
Active Visits by the Numbers shows the number of people that are currently on a specific page or across your entire site. It can show either the total number of people, the new vs. returning users, or the reading/writing/idle activity on a specific page or the entire site.
Mapping Your Visitors
The Incoming Visitors Map is a simple mashup of Google Maps and the chartbeat ‘recent’ API call that plots the physical location of visitors to your site, along with what page they’re reading. The mashup is open source. View a live demo.
Top Stories
The Big Board is a dynamic overview of which articles are trending at the moment on your site. As traffic moves around your site, the pages will automatically rearrange themselves in order of popularity and arrows will indicate the direction of the traffic to that page. The Big Board is an open source project. View a live demo.
The Top Pages widget is a list of the current most visited pages across your site. You can select the number of stores to be shown in the list.
If you’re interested in displaying recent visits and referrers data, check out our Site Widgets page for easy-to-embed widgets. Or, if you want to build something from scratch, sign up for an API key and have all your data at your fingertips.
As always, we’re here to help. If you run into any problems installing the widgets or have an idea for other tools you’d like to see, let us know. Or, if you do something amazing with your chartbeat data, drop us a line. We’d love to see it!
Newsbeat gives your newsroom’s front-line team detailed information on every single page on your site in a way they intuitively understand. You can dive as deep as you want and find the diamonds in the rough.
But newsbeat doesn’t overwhelm you in a flood of data, it sorts the signal from the noise. Newsbeat’s finely tuned algorithms analyze every page in real time and predicts their expected traffic paths.
When something unusual happens, like a spike in traffic, you’ll be immediately alerted by SMS or email and be in the best position to respond.
Please check out the newsbeat product tour, sign up for your free 30-day trial, and join us in building the new newsroom.
Coasting Past 4 Million!
We first hit 4 million active visitors across all chartbeat sites over a month ago, but now we can confidently say it isn’t a one time thing. 4 million and cruising!!
Thanks to amazing partners and some very forthcoming users, we know people love chartbeat but we’re confident you’ll absolutely obsess over newsbeat. We’re really excited for the road to come!
