Archive for November, 2012

5 Cyber Monday Tips from Chartbeat

November 25th, 2012 by Juliana

You fought your way through pounds of turkey and faced the sales-crazed hordes of Black Friday but the most daunting part of the week’s just ahead for you ecommerce warriors: Cyber Monday.

Experts are predicting a record Cyber Monday this year, meaning ecommerce sites are about to get a whole lotta traffic starting in t-minus 15 hours. The hype is high (Mobile Thursday what the what?!), but since lot of our clients are going to be working a ton over the next 24 hours as their sites are inundated with shoppers, we thought we’d share some last-minute tips with you.

Chartbeat + Cyber Monday= Real-time retail

You’ve been planning and prepping, but as we know with the slippery social web, not everything can be predicted. The Chartnerds put their heads together and drafted up a Top Five Ways You Can Use Chartbeat’s Data on Cyber Monday List: A Tab-by-Tab Guide to Real-Time Success. Clearly, we’re still working on that title, so let’s go with:

How Chartbeat can help you kick butt on Cyber Monday

1. Get Up-Close-and-Personal with Your Top Pages: Sleuth out your most popular items using Chartbeat and make sure those those products are featured prominently on your homepage.

2. Get to the Source: Know how shoppers are getting to your site and if they’re new or returning. You may need to give them a little extra TLC if they’re hitting you from a search engine for the first time, for example. If you’re getting a ton of mobile traffic, make sure you have a team focused on giving it some extra manpower tomorrow. Things always go awry at the worst possible moment – make sure you’re ready.

3. Create the Buzz: See what all the chatter is focused on – which of your products are getting last-minute attention and do the work to make sure all those Twitter influencers know your shop is the place to score it. And, of course, triple check that it’s easy to find when they hit your site.

4. Don’t Make ‘Em Wait: You’ll need to keep an eye on your fast as a rocketship or slow as a snail user page load time. Shoppers aren’t inclined to wait more than a second or two for your the product to load on site so they can scoop it up. They’ll move onto another site in a flash.

5. Geo-target: Target your inventory to the right places. We have some pretty quick and cool geo data that gives you a snapshot of where your site visitors are coming from. Getting a lot West Coast visitors on your site? Alert your Bay Area warehouse to get ready for a ton of orders.

Best of luck tomorrow, dear ecommerce friends. We’ll be standing by if any of you guys need a little Chartcorps or Dev support. Just holler if you need us.

Your Best Story on Digg & LinkedIn Today

November 19th, 2012 by Juliana

“We signed up for Chartbeat because it looked interesting, it might give us extra metrics to think about. What it actually did was become a vital business tool, bringing analytics to life, giving us a traffic pulse to watch, learn and react to in real time. Now, instead of reporting our traffic, Chartbeat is taking an active role in increasing it: sending out alerts to partner editorial sites whenever VICE has spiking content, getting our stories in front of editors as they’re trending, so they can feature them and build our momentum.”

- Jesse Knight, CTO, VICE Media Inc.

That’s a mighty nice spike you got there VICE (dashboard displaying only traffic from Digg)

Way to make the Chartteam blush, VICE. We’re getting love from VICE because last month Digg picked up one of Vice’s spiking stories through Chartbeat Publishing’s Content Spike Promotions.

What’s a Content Spike Promotion?
We partnered with Digg and LinkedIn Today to create a private Twitter feed that sends them links to our opt-ed in clients’ spiking stories – only the spiking story’s headlines and links to the story. Source–specific client data like traffic numbers or engagement stats remain private. The folks at Digg and LinkedIn select the top content they think is a fit for their readers and then publish these stories on the Digg homepage or on LinkedIn Today.

And that’s exactly what happened to VICE after they signed up for Content Spike Promotions. A VICE story that was already doing well, “Breaking into Porn on Purpose”-FYI possibly NSFW– experienced a meteoric rise in traffic when Digg republished the story. A well-earned traffic spike suddenly meant the story was exposed to a whole new group of readers on Digg.

In the future, when a client’s story gets picked up by LinkedIn or Digg, we’ll mark it as a Notable Event in their dashboard’s Event Stream. That way you publishers will immediately be able to determine how the Digg or LinkedIn referral affects your traffic – and you can work your magic to keep them around, turning them into loyal readers.

Beyond the initial spike
The whole point of Content Spike Promotions is to help Chartbeat Publishing clients grow their audience. When a story gets a bigger and newer audience through Content Spike Promotions, our real-time Dashboard and Heads Up Display helps clients with the next step – developing a strategy for keeping new visitors on their site and coming back for more great content.

Digg and LinkedIn get the best content from the best publishers, and the best publishers get the right audience hitting their top stories.

And us over here at Chartbeat? We’re loving that we can play the role of matchmaker.

Fox News Sees Its Highest Traffic Ever

November 13th, 2012 by Lauryn

Yup, we’re talking about election night. Still. Why? Because holy smokes did it absolutely destroy every record ever or what? Well, a lot of them anyway.

While we never ever ever share our client’s individual data – we are incredibly excited (sometimes more than the newsrooms themselves) when they have great nights. CNN, Politico, and Fox News all saw amazing traffic surges that night, and we couldn’t be happier of them. These guys are some of the best in the business and to see all that hard work and talent pay off in a matter of hours makes the whole Chartteam feel like proud mamas.

A couple of our favorite quotes:

Jeff Misenti states that Fox News hit 1.2 million concurrents

FoxNews.com had its best night ever….”We were prepared for a traffic increase, but it was surprising. The numbers were higher than expected,” said Jeff Misenti, vp and gm of Fox News Digital. According to Misenti, between 8 p.m. until well past midnight, FoxNews.com’s Chartbeat consistently recorded around 1.2 million concurrent users on the site.

CNN watched how their Twitter presence drove serious traffic to their site

For CNN, the traffic bump was also no doubt buoyed by the network’s dominant Twitter presence. At 24,000 mentions, CNN was cited more than any other news network. And John King, thanks to his deft electoral map maneuvering, became a one-man Twitter trend as the night rolled on, even picking up some sponsored ad buys from a third party.

Politico was incredible to watch as they crushed their typical site performance

Politico Live, the site’s foray into original video, was streamed 108,000 times (the show also aired on C-SPAN).

As Doug from our Chartcorps stated, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a publisher increase their concurrent traffic so dramatically in such a short period of time. Politico’s search and social traffic was incredible to watch.”

We’re looking forward to the next event that will put the 2012 election to shame. Make sure y’all are prepped to take advantage of it all right when it happens.

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