We figure you might not have your eyes on your Chartbeat Dashboard all day. We know that you’re busy.
But even if you’re paying close attention, there is some information that can’t be fully realized or understood until the dust settles – once the day is over, all the pings have been counted and the final results are in.
Our motivation for creating Chartbeat Perspectives was simple: For a long time, Chartbeat customers have been asking us for an end-of-day summary that measured the totality of what happened on their site the previous day. Basically, you guys requested some more context around your site’s data, and we heard you loud and clear.
But we wanted to take things a step further – in addition to providing a general overview of your must-know information (traffic volumes, top stories and sections, top referrers) we wanted to uncover the more significant insights that help newsrooms really piece together what happened. The insights that contribute to a larger understanding the value of your content as it pertains to the quality of your audiences’ experiences.
Starting with the basics, the Daily Perspective surfaces that simple but slightly elusive information, for e.g.:
- Who was your biggest referrer?
-
What was your top social page? Search page?
-
Which page attracted the most new visitors?
It also gets at more deeply hidden information:
-
How many stories were published site wide, or in a given section?
-
Was that number up or down and does it explain traffic volumes?
And finally the traffic anomalies worth knowing – for e.g. if search or social traffic were substantially up or down. We’ll also tell you if you succeeded in getting your sideways traffic to stick around and read more.
Where do you find these insights? Let’s take a quick tour….
Top Stories by Audience Engagement
The Daily Perspective starts with a list of your top stories, as measured by total engaged minutes.
“What the blazes is an engaged minute?” you ask.
An engaged minute is a minute spent by a visitor actually reading or watching or writing – a minute he/she spends investing in your content. When a visitor goes ‘idle’ (no keyboard or mouse events in an active tab), Chartbeat stops counting Engaged Time.
Engaged Time is important because it tells us something not only about the volume of traffic, but also the quality of the content – did people fully consume the piece or did they chase a fun-sounding headline only to leave once the story fell short of their expectations?
That’s Engaged Time. Now back to the tour. Here’s the top stories view.
For each of the top stories we show you a graph of concurrent visitors and what the peak number was, as well as the Average Engaged Time on the story (how much Engaged Time on average a visitor spent on the story).
You’ll be surprised to find that often the story that had the most concurrent visitors didn’t have the most Total Engaged Time. In fact, there will be stories in this list that were only briefly broke the top ten in your dashboard – or maybe they didn’t reach the top ten at all. Or the story was big in the evening or early morning when you weren’t at your dashboard (we’ll see an example of that later).
Click on a story to get additional insights:
The top referrer is listed for every story. Other vital takeaways are also listed, if there are any. In the above instance it’s noted that this story was successful in driving visitors further into the site.
Here’s an article that was popular (lots of concurrents) and had great Average Engaged Time (over 3 minutes). From what we know about Engaged Time and audience growth and what others have likewise figured out, these exceptional pieces of content are what really build a loyal audience.
Top Sections by Audience Engagement
The sections summary is organized similarly to the top stories. The ten sections with the most Engaged Time are listed down the main column and compared to the same day from the week before, with most important takeaways displayed in the left column.
It’s easy to see which sections totally crushed it. In this case Environment obviously had a huge day, and Local was off-pace.
And the takeaways on the left provide those below-the-surface insights. In this case it mentions that Politics had a substantial amount of traffic from links.
To dig deeper into what happened within that section, use the section filter to generate a report exclusively for that section – complete with all the top pages and top referrers for those pages.
A peak at the Daily Perspective for Politics will help us understand why it did so well that day. What were the big stories? Big referrers? How much content went out?
Summary
Every report, including the ones for individual sections also has a third part – the summary. What does this summary tell us about Monday, March 25th on Gawker.com?
Total Engaged Time was down 27% compared to the previous Monday. Meanwhile the total number of stories published was way up – double what it was the previous week. And if you look at the peak concurrents you can see that in general there just wasn’t as much traffic. But then there’s that big spike at the end of the day on the previous Monday (denoted by the grey line). What was that?
To look at a Daily Perspective for any day in the pastjust use the date selector control.
And here’s the answer – at least regarding that late night spike.
Coming soon: more access to historical data
Look forward to much, much, more in terms of access to your historical data.
Very shortly you’ll see a Weekly Perspective that we hope will really rock your world. The Weekly Perspectives aim straight at understanding your audience – where they come from and their propensity to return. Not all visitors are a good fit for what you do – some come, consume, and move on. Others stick around, read more, and drop subtle hints that they’ll be back. The Weekly Perspectives will help you identify these visitors so you can concentrate on acquiring and retaining more of them – we want to help you figure out what’s bringing your audience in today and what will keep them coming back tomorrow and long after that.
Your feedback is very welcome regarding our Daily Perspectives – so let us know what you think and how we can help out more with your audience loyalty goals.