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.

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.

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.

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!

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

After selecting the plan you want, click change and hey presto you’ll be able to add more sites. One caveat: early users who signed up with Paypal will have to switch to a more standard payment method to add more domains, because of restrictions in the way Paypal handles charges. Please contact support@chartbeat.com if you have any issues.

New plans for very high traffic sites

We’ve also previously been limiting the number of concurrent visitors measured on each site to 5,000 at any one time. This safely covers all but the biggest sites on the web. However, a few companies with massive audiences have been asking us for a higher limit, so over the last few weeks we’ve been testing higher limits and the system has been responding just fine. As a result, if you are hitting the 5,000 simultaneous visitor cap please do email us at support@chartbeat.com and we can move you onto a tailored plan for your size.

Chartbeat Alert Log

You can navigate back by week to understand how the events are grouped over time and what’s more we’ve beefed up the replay function. Always a rather hidden function of chartbeat, each alert now comes with a replay button that enables you to replay the period in time surrounding the alert and better understand what caused it. Was a traffic spike caused by a specific referrer or search term? Which page were visitors hitting when your page load slowed? What was the activity on your site immediately prior to it crashing. The replay can give you insight into all of these so that you can better understand, respond and prepare for a repeat of an unusual event. Please let us know what you think!

We’ve also been making various other smaller changes to improve the performance of chartbeat, removing some experimental code and minimizing the size of the cookie we set. Rest assured we’ll keep striving to make chartbeat leaner. If you feel that chartbeat is slowing your site down, remember Firefox may be tricking you, and please vote up the Firefox bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383811.

Global Dashboard

We’ve made significant changes to the Global Dashboard so now you can see real-time data from all your sites on one page. We’ve also added a handy graph that compares today’s traffic to the same time last week. As an extra bonus, you can now see the last alert each site registered and set up an alert from the dashboard quickly and easily too.

Alerts

The alerts page has graduated from a lightbox to it’s own page and we’ve now made it possible for you to choose to receive an email and an SMS, instead of just one or the other. We’ve also made some significant upgrades to the various pages in the settings so they should be clearer, easier to use and more informative than before.

Please do let us know what you think of the changes and what you’re most keen to see next. We can think of a thousand directions to take chartbeat, but we want to know what would be most useful for you!