“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.

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.