Big Board is one of our favorite ways to display data. It’s a leaderboard-style visualization of your top stories that displays the essential information—article link, number of concurrents, Engaged Time, Recirculation and referrer sources. Big Board came out of a Chartbeat Hack Week some years ago and has since become a popular addition to newsrooms all over the world. And, now that we’ve open sourced the code, Big Board is totally customizable.
So, how do I access Big Board for my site?
Visit chartbeat.com/labs, where you’ll find Big Board front and center. If you mouse over the “Try It Out” button, you’ll see a dropdown list of your available domains.
Note: you’ll need to be signed into Chartbeat to access Big Board for your site.
Where should I put my Big Board?
We’ve found that many newsrooms like to display their Big Board in the center of their workspaces. It’s a fast and easy way to keep everyone in the know, especially if you’re using a big-screen TV or projector that makes Chartbeat visible to everyone. For some Big Board Feng Sui inspiration, check out how CNBC International, USA Today, Gawker, Glenn Beck, and CNN Money style theirs.
Big Board on Display at News-Press in Ft. Myers. Photo Courtesy of the Latino Reporter
Can I customize what’s showing on Big Board?
The newest version of Big Board comes with some basic options: you can choose whether you want to see numbers and/or real-time graphs, or filter by section. You can also sort top performing articles by total visitors, Engaged Time, and by social, internal or new traffic. Simply click the settings gear and select your preferences from the drop down menu to make your Big Board make sense for your workflow and data priorities
What else can I display on Big Board?
To get even more out of Big Boards, check out these quick hacks:
- If you’re using Chartbeat Publishing you can append “&group=author” to the end of your Big Board URL to get a leaderboard style list of all of your writers sorted in real time by how many people are reading their articles.
- If you’re responsible for multiple domains, Big Boards can display top stories from across your domain library. Just type as many domain names as you like into the host field in the URL, separating each with a comma, and voilà, you have data for all your sites.
- If you’re a visual person, Big Board Mosaic (also available at chartbeat.com/labs) represents top pages as tiles. The larger the tile, the greater its share of traffic.
- For more technical information on customizing your Big Board using our API keys take a look here.
Big Board Mosaic in action at Vice.com offices. Photo Courtesy of Kevin McCarthyLabs Projects
Big Board is just one of the awesome labs projects we have available at chartbeat.com/labs. On the Labs page you’ll also find a host of super cool ways to display and keep tabs on your data, including real-time heat maps, WordPress modules, and On-Desktop notifiers.