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.

Ted Rheingold CEO of Dogster, Inc. took the time to tell us a little bit about how his team use Chartbeat:

Chartbeat has become a permanent addition to our quiver of critical stat tools. We use it on all our sites and refer to it daily. Chartbeat has 2 major purposes for us:

Get a baseline

The first is to baseline how many people are on our sites at certain times of day and what pages they are on. This kind of data is pretty easy to get from daily analytic tools and/or log parsing, but Chartbeat’s visual data displays make it easy to quickly pattern match how your traffic divides up to different sections of your sites. Other well-visualized data sets are page loading time, time spent on site, and country of origin. So pretty quickly you can imprint on your brain what your baselines are. At this point you can mostly ignore it. In fact I recommend that unless something changes more than 25% in any direction ignore it. As long as it has settled back down the next time you look it rarely is worth understanding. Chartbeat has some historical data so if you forgot a baseline you can see it, but I almost never go into the historical tabs.

Track unusual events

The second use then is to track real time aberrations. I consider this akin to deep-sea fishing. You catch a 15 lb. Fish, who cares. You catch a 25 lb. fish it’s neat, but just throw it in the cooler (sorry for the cold blooded analogy, but I hope you just liked that pun). But when you have a 450 lb. marlin on the line you want every advantage you can get. So we go right to Chartbeat. What page are they going to, who is sending them, what else are they doing, how has page load time degraded, how is time-on-site affected, etc. Then once that is grokked, you can just maintain an overview look of how many of them are still coming and staying. Yes all this data will be in your web logs in 2 to 24 hours, but you want to make the most of the whale on your line. Yes your system tools can tell you server loads, cache hits, cpu usage, but an editor can never make sense of that. So now you can have distributed decision making. We had a Digg hit coincide with a big e-newsletter and the editorial team was able to remove widgets and other processor intensive but non-critical embeds from the site getting hit and watch the page load time go down.

Alerts

The reason our team can respond so fast now is that we use Chartbeat’s alert emails to know when something big is happening. They have a range of alerts you can get, but the only ones we do are: Site traffic is above monthly average, and site is not responding. The first lets everyone know there’s a marlin in the line. We’ve even added this alert to our on-call system as it’s really nice when you’ve been woken up at 3am to debug a page to see the issue is a site’s being slammed by a digg like service from Australia. Sure saves having to do a full diagnostic review when you’re brain hasn’t started working yet. And we use the site downtime alert as a 3rd backup. Sometimes monitoring services get misconfigured and you don’t realize that every night for 15 minutes your site is unreachable. Now you will.

Chartbeat on the iphone

A nice addition is the iPhone app Chartbeat just launched. Any webstat service that uses flash (chartbeat included) becomes mostly useless when viewed via a mobile browser. So now if I see an alert on the weekend I can open the app and check out the traffic. Did something get dugg? Next round is on me. Are 16 different IPs from around the world all hammering our register page? Time to duck out and make sure oncall coverage is available.

There’s probably a lot more we could use Chartbeat for, but with stat services less is more. We just want to know enough that we can ignore it or respond. So we take care before adding each new service that it’s something that will truly make a difference.

If you like these kinds of topics I twitter them @tedr and blog them at blog.dogster.com.

Ted Rheingold
CEO Dogster, Inc.

Dogster Inc. runs a network of pet-related Internet properties. We have sites for dog owners, cats owners, pet id and registry, cute and fuzzy lovers, pet deals, you name it. We even have an app so dogs can chat on the iPhone!

You’re away from your computer when you get an alert on your phone that traffic has spiked to an all-time high. Was it random good fortune or did something happen, good or bad, to cause the spike that you need to get on top of? To ensure that you can access your real-time analytics in real time when you need them, chartbeat has released a free iphone app that can keep you in touch with the heartbeat of your site wherever you may be.

The chartbeat app comes with push notification alerts so that you can be the first to know when something is happening on your site, be it traffic spiking on a particular blog post, page load slowing significantly or the site itself going down. You can then go to the iphone app and get the essential information you need:

• How many people are on my site?
• What are they doing?
• Where did they come from?
• How is my site performing?

The app is available for free from the App Store, please let us know what you think! If you would like to see your analytics on the go but don’t have a chartbeat account you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here.

Weekly Summaries

Chartbeat will also be sending you a summary each week of the key events important to you that occurred on your sites:

You’ll be able to get a sense of your overall traffic, uptime and site performance from both the server and the user side that should help you better understand the context of the alerts you receive. You can manage your weekly summaries from the Alert page in Chartbeat settings