Chartbeat FAQs

Before you start

Supported browsers for the Heads Up Display include Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. These install instructions will likely work for other browsers as well, but we only guarantee support for these three.

Tip: Your browser may not display the bookmark bar by default, so check to ensure it's viewable before following the steps below. In Chrome,you can use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+B (Windows and Chrome OS) or Command+Shift+B (Mac).

Note:If you are unable to install the HUD bookmarklet by dragging the icon below into your bookmarks bar, try using the alternative installation method near the end of this page.

How to install Heads Up Display in your browser

Step 1

Drag this icon:

Up to your bookmark bar

Step2

Open a new tab and go to your website.

Step 3

Click the Activate HUD bookmarklet. Don't worry if nothing happens right away.

Step 4

Refresh the page.

Once the page has finished loading, you should see the Heads Up Display dock in the upper right hand of your screen.

Step 5

Select the toggle to open the Heads Up Display dock.

Alternative Installation Method

The following steps outline how to install the Heads Up Display if you are using Chrome v.69 or cannot drag the bookmarklet above to the bookmark bar.

Step 1

Right click on your bookmark bar and click Add Page.

Step 2

Name the Bookmark Activate HUD, paste the following link in the URL field and Save:

javascript:(function()%7Bif(window.location.hostname%3D%3D%3D%27chartbeat.com%27)%7Balert(%27Please click this on your website%3B not on chartbeat.com!%27)%3B%7Delse%7Btry%7BlocalStorage._cb_ip%3D%27http://static2.chartbeat.com/js/inpage.js%27%3B%7Dcatch(e)%7B%7D%7D%7D)()%3B

Step 3

Click the Activate HUD bookmarklet. Don't worry if nothing happens right away.

Step 4

Refresh the page.

Once the page has finished loading, you should see the Heads Up Display dock in the upper right hand of your screen.

troubleshooting steps

The Heads Up Display was designed to give you your data where it's most actionable: right on your home, article, and landing pages. It allows you to make fast real-time decisions based on your audience's interaction with your stories. The Heads Up Display will show your top performing stories, find your hidden high-potential opportunities, and makes it easy to review the performance of a link and see where exactly your audience is actively reading.

Main Metrics

Installation

Heads Up Display Dock

Concurrents

Page Performance

Device Type Filters

Article Performance Pins

Clicks & Quality Clicks

Velocity Chevrons

Pin Colors

Scroll Depth

Article View

Main Metrics

Clicks Per Minute-A real-time representation of the clicks per minute that a link is receiving. Rather than averaging a click number over a time period, our algorithm looks at the entire history of clicks for a link in that position, gives more weight to clicks that happened more recently, and outputs its best guess of the expected number of clicks in the next minute.

Quality Clicks-A click that results in at least 15 seconds of reader engaged time on the subsequent article page. Relying solely on click-through-rate to determine homepage optimization disregards the visitor's experience with the content itself. Quality Clicks offers the perfect compromise it identifies content that is not only popular but also interesting enough to hold visitors' attention for more than just the first few lines.

Installation

To install the Heads Up Display, first log in to your Chartbeat Publishing Dashboard and select the "Heads Up Display" link in the left-hand navigation bar.

Then you'll be redirected to the installation page where you'll find instructions for adding the installation bookmarklet to your browser.

If you're having trouble installing or loading the HUD, check out these .

Heads Up Display Dock

Once you've installed the Heads Up Display in your browser, you'll see the dock appear on the right-hand side of your screen. The Chartbeat logo lets you navigate around the Publishing Suite, and you can use the toggle to collapse the HUD interface without uninstalling it.

Concurrents

The first number under that is concurrents, the number of people on the page in real-time. When you select it, it opens a card with some historical information on the number of concurrents over the past two hours, broken out into their visitor frequency buckets.

Depending on your page's performance you might see contextual information either a green arrow pointing up or a red arrow pointing down. This gives you an idea of how the current audience size compares to the average number of visitors to that page that we've seen previously at this time.

Page Performance

The next set of numbers compare the total number of clicks per minute occurring on that page in real-time, and beneath that, the percentage of them that are considered 'Quality Clicks'. A quality click means that after a reader clicked through to the article page, they spent at least 15 seconds of engaged time actually reading the content.

In the default view on the dock, the page performance tells you how many clicks per minute the entire page is getting compared to your benchmark for that hour of the day on a weekday or weekend. Select the clicks per minute section and it opens a card with some historical information on the ratio of clicks to quality clicks over the past two hours, as well as the top five links on the page ranked by their clicks per minute.

Device Type Filters

Finally, the Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet section tells you the percentage of concurrents currently viewing the page with each device type.You can filter on each device type to see how visitors experiencing the various layouts of your page are interacting differently.

This allows you to seamlessly simulate your visitors' mobile experience and adapt your page design based on just that audience's behavior. If you're filtered on mobile, remember to shrink your browser width to between 300px and 400px so as to simulate your mobile visitors' experience. See what they see and see what they're doing clicks, quality clicks, and scroll depth.

Article Performance Pins

The Heads Up Display uses numbered and colored pins to show you link performance for stories on your homepage. The number inside the pin is the article's ranking in terms of clicks per minute: the lower the number, the more clicks the link is receiving. The color gives you an idea of how a given links' clicks per minute compares to an article's usual performance in that position.

Our clicks per minute metric is a real-time representation of the click activity that a link is receiving. Rather than averaging a click number over a time period, a machine learning algorithm looks at the entire history of clicks for a link in that position, gives more weight to clicks that happened more recently, and outputs the number of clicks we expect the article to receive in the next minute.

Our system will stop tracking click activity only if we're confident no one is clicking on it anymore. So we'll keep building models for articles that are getting less than 0.1 CPM until we're sure that it's really getting zero clicks.

For more information on a link's metrics, simply select the pin and a card expands with more details, including the percentage of quality clicks, link performance over the last two hours, and the average engaged time people are spending on that article.

Clicks vs. Quality Clicks

We've always informed you on which links are receiving the highest clicks per minute, but by comparing those clicks to Quality Clicks (stories which are receiving at least 15 seconds of post-click engagement), you can see which stories are driving more people actually reading, not just landing on, your highest quality content.

Quality Clicks are a powerful metric for homepage editors. Relying solely on clicks per minute to determine homepage optimization disregards the visitor's experience with the content itself. Quality Clicks offers the perfect compromise it identifies content that is not only popular but also interesting enough to hold visitors' attention for more than just the first few lines.

Velocity Chevrons

The colored chevrons visible next to the clicks per minute ranking number as well as in the Article Performance card indicate the real-time trend of the associated article's clicks per minute. Even without expanding the entire card you can see at a glance if a link is gaining or losing traction. The new colored chevrons alert you to when an article on your homepage is trending up or down in traffic, so you can take action to capitalize on an article that's gaining traction, or take time to update one that's decreasing in traffic.

Pin Colors

The color refers to that links' relative performance given what Chartbeat is used to seeing for a link in that position at a certain time for that hour of the day on a weekday or weekend. Green pins are overperformingarticles that are doing better than usual in that position during this time. Red pins are the opposite; for whatever reason an article is receiving fewer clicks than an article usually does in that position.

Scroll Depth

The Heads Up Display offers two different ways to look at scroll depth.

The default view gives you a historical look at the max scroll depth for everyone in the last 6 hours. Now you can easily see how far people typically scroll down a given page.

Selecting the Scroll Depth Bar switches to the second view. The expanded teal bars show where high percentages of visitors stopped scrolling on the page.

The bigger the bar, the more visitors that stopped. When you see a bar that extends far into the page, you have an opportunity to determine what made those visitors stop scrolling maybe it's a link, a video, or some other visual.

Article View

When you open the Heads Up Display on an article page, you'll see a slightly modified version of the dock.

The first difference is in the Concurrents section of the dock. When you select the concurrents metric, the graph is broken out into traffic sources instead of visitor frequency so you can get a better sense of how people are finding this article.

Instead of displaying page-wide clicks per minute and quality clicks, we'll show you the average engaged time and recirculation percentage in real time for all visitors on this article.

There's also an easy link to jump right into that page's entry in Real-Time or Historical so you can quickly get more data on that audience.

A - G | H - N | O - Z

Acquiring Badge

The acquiring badge appears next to an article thats drawing lots of new visitors. Make sure this page has plenty of engaging content and well-placed links to encourage recirculation.

App

All the traffic from people who are using your native App. This will only show up if youre using our Mobile SDK to track your app.

Camcorder Icon

If you're tracking your video content with our Video Dashboard, the camcorder icon will call out the percentage of visitors currently watching a video on the page.

Chevrons

Green and red chevrons tell you about the velocity of an article's ascent or descentthat is, whether a page is gaining or losing visitors faster than the average page.

Concurrents

The total number of people on your site at any given moment, as measured by the number of browsing sessions that have loaded a page with Chartbeat code. Note that this number includes both active (people who have engaged with the page and/or have it in view) and idle (people with the tab in the background/minimized and/or haven't engaged in two hours) concurrents.

Desktop

Traffic from people who are using a desktop or laptop computer to browse your site (measured by user agent).

Direct Traffic

Visitors who navigate directly to landing pages on you website without referrer data. These are typically your loyal visitors, users who type your site name directly into their URL bar or use bookmarks to arrive to your site.

DMA

DMA stands for Designated Market Area. The Nielsen Company uses these 210 geographic regions to measure local television viewing in the United States.

Email, Apps, IMs

"Emails, Apps, IMs" is Chartbeat's answer to 'Dark Social', non-direct traffic that comes to a site by without referrer data. When links to content are shared across any HTTPS secure connection (which is frequently over email, IMs, or apps) the referrer ping-key is blank even though it wasn't "direct traffic". To solve this we bucket concurrents who arrive without referrer data who are linked to article pages with long URL structures under "Email, Apps, IMs" because we assume it highly unlikely an individual would type that URL directly into their nav bar.

Read more about how we measure dark social here.

Engaged Time

The average time in seconds visitors are spending actively interacting with your content: including scrolls, clicks, mouse movements, touch events, and keystrokes. We track reader activity every second and report engagement stats back to our servers every 15 seconds, through the Chartbeat JS that is deployed when the code loads. Click here for more information on our methodology.

Guest

Refers to real-time visitors on your site that are designated as neither a registered user nor a subscriber. Note that this filter only appears after an additional code implementation.

Internal Traffic

The people who are moving page by page through your website.

L Badge

The L badge will identify a landing page, such as a homepage or section front.

Mobile

Traffic from any mobile devices (measured by user agent)

New Visitors

Visitors that are on your site for the first time in 30 days. These are the people who might not know your site too well, and offer a chance to make a strong first impression.

Links Traffic

The people who are visiting through any external link, such as blogs and news sites.

Loyal Visitors

People who have visited your site at least eight of the last 16 days about every other day or more. By paying attention to their habits you can understand what keeps them coming back time and time again.

Pageviews

An instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed. Note that a single user can record multiple pageviews in the same browsing session; if a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

Pageview and Unique impression running totals in the Real-Time Dashboard begin at midnight (12:00:00am) in the time zone that your domain is set to.

Publish Date

Publish Date is recorded as the first date that Chartbeat measures at least 5 concurrents on a unique page URL. It displays the date and time a piece of content on your site was first tracked by Chartbeat, to provide additional context around how your top stories are performing in the moment.

Recirculation

Recirculation is a real-time metric that compares the number of people on a given page to the number of people who have traveled from that page to another article page. The actual number refers to the percentage of people who are still on a subsequent page compared to the current audience of the first page.

Registered

Refers to real-time visitors on your site that are designated as logged in or registered user. Note that this filter only appears after an additional code implementation.

Retaining Badge

The retaining badge appears next to an article that has high rcirculation or engaged timeor both. This is the kind of engaging article that you should push to the biggest audience possible.

Returning Visitors

People who have visited your site more than once in the past 30 days, but less frequently than every other day. This is the group that have some idea of what kind of content you offer, but still need some encouragement before they become loyal.

Search Traffic

The people who are coming using search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Site

All the traffic on your regular desktop site.

Site Context

A real-time metric that benchmarks the concurrents of an article on a given site within the context of all articles appearing on that site, and scores it from 1-10 based on that context. A site context of 0 indicates that the article is underperforming compared to how articles normally perform at that time and day. Similarly, a site context of 10 indicates an article is over-performing in comparison to expected performance for that time and day.

To learn more about the Site-Context metric, you can visit our "What is Site Context?" article.

Social Traffic

The people who are coming through popular social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Reddit.

Social Media Badges

Social media badges tell you what percent of the current audience came to that page from specific social sources.

Subscriber

Refers to real-time visitors on your site that are designated as paid subscribers. Note that this filter only appears after an additional code implementation.

Tablet

Traffic from any tablet device (measured by user agent)

Unique Users (Uniques)

Unique users is a metric defined as the total number of users that have visited a page, group of pages, or site.

Pageview and Unique impression running totals in the Real-Time Dashboard begin at midnight (12:00:00am) in the time zone that your domain is set to.

Unclassified

Unclassified visitors are readers that do not store their visit frequency. This includes those who opt out of tracking cookies and those arriving through distribution channels that do not store this data. For example, Instant Articles and App (SDK) store visit frequency data. AMP and Apple News do not.

Unspecified

Refers to real-time visitors who do not meet criteria for Subscriber, Registered, or Guest categories. If you believe that visitors are being misclassified as 'anon', please contact your Account Manager to review your Subscriber Status implementation.

UTM Medium

identifies what media type was used, such as cost per click or email.

UTM Source

The UTM Source parameter identifies which site sent the traffic, for example 'Facebook', 'newsletter', or 'rss'.

How does article search work

Our Real-Time Dashboard makes it easy to understand how your audience is connecting with your content in the moment -- across platforms, channels, and devices -- so you can take action to optimize for visitor engagement when it's most impactful for your site. Filter your real-time traffic data by sections, authors, location, referrer and more. Understand how new readers engage differently than loyal readers, or guest users versus subscribed. Monitor traffic across all your platforms by integrating Chartbeat for your Accelerated Mobile Pages, Instant Articles, and native apps, and quickly see how each story is generating buzz on the major social platforms with our built-in CrowdTangle integration.

Main Metrics

Top Pages

Traffic by Source/UTM & Referrers

Section & Author Filters

Concurrents by Traffic Source Graph

Visitor Frequency

Device & Distribution

Location

Tweets by Traffic

Video

Offsite Social

Multi-Site View

Article Search

Main Metrics

In the top left corner of the Dashboard you will find our three main metrics; Concurrents, Recirculation, and Engaged time.

Concurrents is a live count of all active sessions open to your site currently. Think of this number as total open pages to your site where visitors are currently or recently engaging. Hover over the dial to learn the expected range at any point in time based on your real-time traffic volume data that we collect and model for each hour of the day.

Recirculation is the percentage of open sessions directly referred by other article pages on your site. It tells you how well your article pages are doing to drive readers deeper into your site by clicking into additional content.

Engaged Time is the average number of seconds visitors actively engage with each page on your site by scrolling, clicking, typing, etc. It tells you how well your site is holding readers' attention at any given moment.

Hover over the site-wide Recirculation & Engaged Time metrics for more context on how your site typically performs over the last month.

Top Pages

The heart of the Dashboard, the Top Pages section displays a constantly updating list of your highest traffic and most engaging stories. By default, this list is sorted by total concurrents on each page, but you can also sort top pages by average engaged time and recirculation. With the additional option to view total pageviews and uniques so far today for each story, this is the best way for team to understand what's resonating with your audience throughout the day in order to make informed decisions programming decisions.

Click on any top page to learn more about how visitors are arriving to your content, and where they go next in your site with the 'Next Pages' list.

Select the vertical ellipses icon in the top right corner of this section to customize your Top Page list with secondary metrics of your choosing, along with the option to hide or display landing pages in this list.

Traffic by Source/UTM & Referrers

By default, theTraffic by Source/UTM module in the upper right corner of the Real-Time Dashboard breaks out your traffic into five referrer categories: Internal, Social, Links, Direct, and Search. For all open sessions to your site, we're measuring how the direct referrer to their current page. For side door visitors who've just clicked to their first page on your site from another platform, these visitors will be categorized as Social, Links, or Search. Visitors who navigate directly to your homepage and section front pages are categorized as Direct, and all visitors, regardless of the platform they were originally referred to your site by, are recategorized as Internal as they click into additional pages of your site using your internal links. Filter on any of these categories to monitor the unique behaviors and pages these visitors engage with.

Internal - visitors who arrived to their current page via another page on your site.

Direct -visitors who arrive directly to your landing pages by typing in the URL or using a bookmark.

Links -visitorswho arrive directly via an external link, such as blogs and other news sites that are directing traffic to your platform.

Search -visitors arriving directly viasearch engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Social -visitors arriving directly viasocial platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Reddit.

If your team uses Google UTM codes to identify visitors referred from specific platforms or campaigns like newsletters or sponsored social posts, use the 'Source' drop-down to toggle this module to 'UTM', revealing a new set of filters for your highest traffic campaigns or platforms as determined by the values assigned to your utm_source and utm_medium URL parameters.

Below the Traffic Source module, get a more detailed breakout of the various external sites and platforms referring traffic to your site with the concurrents by Referrers list. Just like the Traffic by Source module, you can filter on any one of these referrers to hone in on your site's active visitors directly referred from a particular platform like Google Search or Facebook.

Section & Author Filters

At the top of your Real-Time Dashboard, you will find our Section & Authordrop-down filters. These menus pull in the highest traffic sections and authors on your site at any given moment by the number of active visitors (concurrents) on pages within these sections, or attributed to these authors. Scroll through the list to identify and filter on your top performing sections and authors, or type to search for a particular section or author name. The drop-down will only display the top 100 values for each parameter, but searching will reveal any section or author currently receiving traffic via an attributed page on your site.

Note that these values are customizable in the sense that they must be configured in the Chartbeat code on your site and across your Chartbeat integrated platforms.

Concurrents by Traffic Source Graph

Our Concurrents by Traffic Source Graph makes at-a-glance traffic monitoring easier than ever before, and we think it's quite pretty to boot! This graph, updating by the minute, displays trend lines for each traffic source category by count of simultaneous visitors. The overlaid gray traffic line displays the concurrents trend line for this day last week for quick and simple comparison.

Run your cursor over the graph for detailed summaries of your active visitor counts throughout the day, watch for blue Spike Alert bubbles indicating that one of your pages is picking up higher than usual Social or Links traffic, and click into the 7-day and 30-day views for broader historical context of your site's current performance.

Watch as the dynamic graph updates to display new information as you navigate through Top Pages and filter the Dashboard. The following filters are supported by this graph: sections, authors, traffic sources, devices, and visitor frequency.

Visitor Frequency

Understand the behaviors and preferences of your visitors by how frequently they come to your site with the Visitor Frequency module and audience filters. Chartbeat categorizes your visitors into three groups by how often we see them:

New visitors are visiting the site for the first time in at least 30 days.

Returning visitors have been to your site recently, but not with enough frequency to be considered loyal (at least once before in the last 30 days, but not as often as every other day).

Loyal visitors have been to your site at least eight or more days of the last 16 days. Essentially, these visitors drop by every other day if not every day.

The fourth Unclassified category makes up the group of visitorsthat do not store their visit frequency. This includes those who opt out of tracking cookies and those arriving through distribution channels that do not collect this data, like AMP pages and visitors in the Apple News app.

Device & Distribution

Know how your visitors are experiencing your content with our Device and Distribution filters. See visitor engagement across your mobile, desktop, and tablet audience, and integrate Chartbeat on your accelerated mobile pages, Facebook Instant Articles, and native apps to filter visitors by platform.

Location

Filter by Location to see how your content is reaching visitors around the world. Use the drop-down to group visitors by country, region, city, or DMA (Designated Marketing Area).

Tweets by Traffic

Monitor top tweets from your social team and external influencers by the number of concurrents they've brought to your site in the Tweets by Traffic section.

Video

With our Video tracking integration enabled, we pull your on-site video engagement data directly into the Real-Time Dashboard so your team can identify at a glance which Top Pages have videos included and how many visitors are watching versus reading. Across your site, we'll show what percentage of visitors are currently watching video ("watching"), how far through the videos your viewers are watching on average ("video engagement"), or click into a top page with video to see a list of top videos by active viewers on each page.

Offsite Social

Our Offsite Social panel pulls in top social posts generating buzz across the web's major social media platforms, powered by Facebook's popular CrowdTangle tool for Publishers. Without leaving the Chartbeat Dashboard, your editors and reporters can easily identify posts from external influencer pages linking to your content. Sort posts by recency, interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc), or account influence (how many followers the parent account reaches), and filter on the social platforms most important to your team.

Click on any post to jump directly to the page on Facebook or Reddit, and consider engaging directly with those users in the comments section to encourage repeat posts and drive additional traffic.

Multi-Site View

Multi-Site View is a roll-up view of different sites belonging to your account. Its a mode that allows you to pull multiple sites into the Real-Time Dashboard, Historical Dashboard, Big Board, and the Chartbeat mobile app. The Multi-Site View contains a lot of the granular functionality of Chartbeats Dashboards, so you'll be able to analyze your groups data in surgical detail from pivoting from traffic sources, devices and geography of your readership to filtering by Sections or Authors belonging to all your sites.

Note: We do not calculate re-circulation for a Multi-Site View since this metric calculated by comparing the number of people on a given page to the number of people who have traveled from that page to another article page within a single site and not a group of sites.

The Multi-Site View also hosts a new metric known as Site-Context,a real-time metric that benchmarks the concurrents of an article on a given site within the context of all articles appearing on that site, and scores it from 0-10 based on that context.

The Multi-Site View is currently supported in the Real-Time Dashboard, Historical Dashboard, Big Board, and the Chartbeat native app ( Android and iOS ).

At this time, we do not support Multi-Site View in Advanced Queries, Video Dashboard, Reports, or Headline Testing.

Article Search

Article search functionality is available within the Real-Time and Historical Dashboards. It allows users to quickly search and easily locate specific articles by title or keywords associated with article headlines within Chartbeat.

When you search using keywords associated with your article titles, you will get a maximum of 10 results, these being articles that that include your keywords in the title.If youre searching for a story from a sites Real-Time dashboard, we will only surface results for the site you have open, and only articles that are currently receiving traffic at the time of your search.

Learn more about the article search feature in our article.

Article Search is currently supported in our Real-Time and Historical dashboards for single and multi-site views, but not in the Chartbeat mobile app.

To uninstall the Heads Up Display simply open the navigation menu by selecting the Chartbeat icon at the top of dock and select the 'Uninstall' button.

site context

A view of your site's data designed for large-format display in the office, and a recognizable presence in cutting-edge newsrooms around the world. The Big Board unites your newsroom around your real-time audience data so everyone knows what stories & topics are succeeding at attracting large audiences and holding visitors' attention in the moment.

Main Metrics

Installation

Settings

Main Metrics

Similar to the Real-time Dashboard, the Big Board is centered around three real-time audience metrics:

Concurrents:a live count of all active sessions open to your site currently.

Recirculation:the percentage of active users reading additional pages on your site, directly referred by one of your other article pages.

Engaged Time:the average number of seconds visitors spend reading on your site.

Installation

The simplest way to access the Big Board in your browser is from the add-ons menu in our left-hand navigation for chartbeat.com signed-in users:

There are a number of ways to display this on the big screen in your newsroom, including more basic setups like display mirroring via TV-connected devices like Apple TV or Chromecast, using your smart TV's built-in web browser, or setting up a more reliable digital signage system with the raspberry pi. However you choose to display the Big Board on your big screen, we recommend getting started with the following two steps on your desktop PC...

Step 1: Explore the Big Board's display configuration options (detailed below) to identify the preferred display(s) for your newsroom. For example, you may choose to show or hide author names under article titles, and the same goes for landing pages and recirculation percentages in the top pages list.

As you select different display options from the Big Board settings pane, URL parameters will be added automatically to the display URL in your browser so you can easily copy a URL that includes your preferred display settings into your digital signage program.

Step 2: Once you've found your preferred display settings, add one more parameter to the URL QSPs:

&apikey={insert your Chartbeat API key here}

This parameter will grant access to the device that requests the Big Board URL from our servers, skipping the chartbeat.com sign-in screen and preventing your display device from occasionally being signed out and redirected to our sign-in page as the login cookie expires.

Create a new API key with all access to any site from your account settings.

Tip #1: You may want to create a unique user account with admin access and use this account solely to generate the all-access API key that powers your Big Board. Since API keys are tied to individual user accounts within your organization, this can help prevent interruption of service caused by the disabling of user accounts as staff members come and go.

Tip #2: Want to maximize the impact of the Big Board in your office? Here's a link you can use that includes our favorite optimized display settings; hiding landing pages from the top pages list, showing author names under article titles, showing the traffic graph and total readers at the top of the dashboard, and displaying page-level recirculation rates for your top stories. Just plug in your site name and API key:

https://chartbeat.com/labs/publishing/bigboard/{INSERT SITE NAME}/?showGraphs=true&network=true&nolps=true&showAuthors=true&showRecirc=true&apikey={INSERT API KEY}

Settings

Click on the Settings button in the top-right corner of the Big Board to explore the various options available to configure your display. We've described all of these options below...

Sort by

Sort the top pages list by concurrents (default), average engaged time, or if you are using the Big Board to display a Multi-Site View configuration.

Filters

Domain(s):select any number of domains that you have access to and see them rolled up into a single Big Board.

Section(s):Apply a section filter to the dashboard to see metrics and top pages for a particular section.

Subscribers: If your selected domain has our subscriber engagement integration enabled in the tracking snippet, this filter appears with options to filter on only your guest registered, or subscribed users.

Platform:Filter the top pages by either desktop, tablet, or mobile and see how content is performing across various device types.

Location: Select a specific country or city you want to filter on and see how your content is reaching a regional audience.

Traffic Source: Choose from our five traffic source categories to filter on active users referred by search, social platforms, etc.

Visitor Frequency: Select new, returning, or loyal visitors to see how your content correlates with different audience groups.

Limit:Limit the number of top pages shown in the ranking; set to 15 by default but you can set it up to 50.

Toggle Settings

Show Graphs:Displays the three main Chartbeat metrics, traffic sources, as well as the concurrents graph at the top of the Big Board. Use it to get a fuller picture of your audience at a glance.

Site Total:Displays the total number of concurrents on your domain (or collection of domains), even ifyou'veapplied a specific filter.

Social Referrers: For articles with significant social traffic, we'll display social referrer badges with share of traffic percentages.

Landing Pages:Landing pages are included by default but can be hidden from view so youre only looking at your top article pages.

Hide Numbers:Hides all the metric numbers from the screen, perfect if you want to share your big board outside the company butdon'twant to expose your actual numbers.

Hide Recirculation:Hidden by default, you can opt to display page-level recirculation percentages on the right-hand side, next to Engaged Time.

Show Authors:Shows article authors beneath titles.

Get in touch with our sales team-- email us at [email protected] to get started. Be sure to include the name of your company, along with the website(s) and/or native app(s) you are interested to get up and running with Chartbeat.

Chartbeat creates a new Referrer Pickup when a story first receives traffic from a new referrer.

As you might expect, the most popular stories on your site might see many unique traffic referrers as these stories are picked up by other outlets and shared across social media. To avoid triggering too many Referrer Pickups, we filter each story's list of Pickups to only include referrers that are predictive of significant traffic.

But aren't all referrers predictive of traffic going up?

It turns out that the answer is no. Some referrers tend to pick up a story early in its life and drive many additional readers. Others (certain search engines, for example) tend to pick up a story later when readership is already starting to decline. Our pickups aim to differentiate between the two.

To predict whether a given referrer is likely to drive an increase in traffic after a pickup, we build a model every day for every referrer to each of your unique sites. This model measures traffic on each story, before and after the pickup, to see whether a pickup is typically followed by an increase in traffic.

Referrer Pickups differ from Spike Alerts. Spike Alerts measure whether a story's traffic has already started to increase in a dramatic way. Referrer Pickups try to form a very early alert that a story's traffic may increase.

Chartbeat creates Spike Alerts when stories receive Social or Links traffic that surpasses a certain "high water mark" threshold. This threshold is automatically calculated by our proprietary algorithm and fine-tuned to each site that we track based on their unique social and external traffic levels.

Our default threshold is set to the 95th percentile, which would mean any story receiving social or externally referred traffic greater than the social/external traffic levels of 94% of other articles on your site would trigger a spike alert. However, our algorithm will automatically raise or lower this threshold to avoid over or under alerting for well-performing articles on your sites.

To load our Heads Up Display, first try following the steps in our HUD install instruction article. If after following these steps you are (A) unable to load the HUD toolbar upon clicking your 'Activate HUD' bookmark link and refreshing the page, or (B) the HUD toolbar loads but displays a prompt to sign in to your Chartbeat account, follow these troubleshooting steps to resolve the issue.

Step 1

Ensure that you are signed in to your Chartbeat account, that your login has access to the Site in Chartbeat where you are trying to install the HUD, and that traffic data is flowing to the associated Real-Time Dashboard for the same site.

Step 2

If you are using an ad blocker plugin for your browser, try disabling the plugin completely in your browser settings and follow the final HUD installation steps once more to see if your issue is resolved (return to your site's homepage, click the 'Activate HUD' bookmark again, and reload the page). To disable a browser extension in chrome, click the following link: chrome://extensions/

If your issue is resolved by disabling your ad blocker plugin, we'd like to know the incompatible plugin you are using so we can prioritize fixes accordingly. Please let us know at [email protected] if this step solves your HUD issue, along with the name of the Chrome extension you found to be responsible for the issue.

Step 3

With ad blockers disabled, check your browser settings to ensure that third-party cookies are not being blocked.While our tracking script doesnt use third-party cookies, the Heads Up Display runs on chartbeat.com which is a third-party domain, so your browser needs to allow third-party cookies for chartbeat.com for the HUD to load. In Chrome, click this link to access your cookie settings and ensure that the "block third-party cookies" setting is toggled OFF: chrome://settings/content/cookies

See instructions for enabling third-party cookies in Safari and Firefox with the links below:

Safari

Firefox

Note: Firefox now includes cookie blocking by default. To disable this setting for your site where you need the HUD to load, click the shield icon in your URL bar, and select the button labeled "Turn off blocking for this site":

Let us know

Step 4

If you're still having issues loading the HUD after following the steps above, it's possible that another one of your browser extensions is conflicting with the Heads Up Display. Try signing in to Chartbeat in an incognito window with plugins disabled and loading the HUD in this window. If the HUD loads, it's almost certainly an indication that one of active your browser plugins is interfering when not in incognito. Try disabling all plugins one-by-one, check after each one to see if the HUD loads on your site to identify the incompatible plugin. If you identify an incompatible plugin, please let us know the details at [email protected] add to our backlog investigating a fix.

It's worth creating a new Chrome profile as well to see if another aspect of your browser settings is in conflict with our HUD code. You can add a new Chrome profile from People > Add Person.

Still having an issue?and we'll take a look.

Chartbeat, the content intelligence platform for publishers, empowers media companies to build loyal audiences with real-time and historical editorial analytics across desktop, social, and mobile platforms. Chartbeat helps digital publishing organizations understand what, within their content, is keeping people engaged. Partnering with over 60,000 media brands across 60+ countries, Chartbeats real-time and historical dashboards, in-depth headline testing and in-page optimization tools, robust reporting, and more help the worlds leading media organizations understand, measure, and build business value from the attention earned by their written and video content.

Dashboards

See how your audience connects with your content in real time, assess KPIs over the long term, and grasp how your videos capture viewer attention.

Guide to Real-Time

Guide to Historical

Guide to Video

Optimization

Adapt user experience and test page elements like headlines within your normal workflow, to know what moves your most valuable audience.

Guide to the Heads Up Display

Guide to Headline Testing

Reporting

Start each day with the data you need whether it's automated insights delivered to you, or flexible tools to build more in-depth reports.

Guide to Reports

Guide to Advanced Queries

[email protected]

Headline testing is the process of using live experiments to get to know your audience on a deeper level. By tracking what kinds of headlines are most successful at getting your audience to actually click into -- and read -- your articles, you can better adapt your homepage strategy to maximize your content exposure, audience engagement, and visitor loyalty.

When you create and run a headline test, new visitors that come to your site are served one of the headline options and we record which version people are clicking into the most. Whats unique about our testing methodology is that it actually exploits the success of winning headlines by 'playing' them more frequently as they prove to outperform other headlines. Then the winning headline is played permanently to your entire audience.

If youre interested you can read more information about the methodology we use, called Thompson Sampling, here.

Main Metrics

Getting Started

Starting a new test

Active and completed tests

Test Results view

Past 7 Days

All Tests

Export Options

Main Metrics

Trialsis a count of sessions to your page where atest headline was loaded and served to a visitor.

Quality Clicks % -When a visitor clicks onto a story and subsequently spends at least 15 seconds of engaged time, it is considered a quality click. Note: whenever a visitor reaches the threshold of 15 engaged seconds it will be retroactively be counted as a quality click. Quality Clicks % displays the ratio of Quality Clicks to total clicks for a given headline.

Click Through Rateis the percentage of visitors who click on a given trial headline. This can be lower than 1%.

CTR Increase is the percent rise in CTR of the winning headline compared to the original for a single test.

(CTR of winner / (CTR of original - 1))

Average CTR Increase is the average percent rise in CTR of all winning headlines compared to orignals for all tests in the past seven days.

AVG (CTR of winner / (CTR of original - 1))

Play % is thepercentage of people being served a given headline, as well as the confidence that headline is "better". For example at 65%, a headline is served to 65% of people and has a 65% certainty that it is "better". Note that at 95% play percentage a headline "wins" and is played 100% of the time.

Getting Started

Headline Testing is just one of the ways that you can be using data to make the most of your homepage audience. So that you can quickly incorporate headline tests into your homepage strategy without interrupting your team's workflow, the Headline Testing tool is built into the Heads Up Display itself.

To get started, just make sure that you've installed the Heads Up Display, then just and select any link thats receiving a pin. From there, simply toggle from the 'Performance' tab to the 'Headline Testing' tab at the top of the card and youre ready to get started.

Please note that Engaged Headline Testing is a premium feature. If you have any questions about your current plan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or send an email to.

Starting a new test

Select a headline on the page that you want to start a test for, and click on its Heads Up Display pin. Next, toggle into the Headline Testing tab in the pin card.

If your articles feature multiple headlines, for example, the main headline and a sub-headline, or a section name as well as a headline, youll be prompted to specify which one you want to run an experiment for. Note that you cannot test a primary and sub-headline simultaneously in this case.

Enter the various headlines you want to test. The first headline will be auto-filled with the headline that appears by default in the page, and as additional headlines are entered they appear inline on the page so you can preview their appearance before starting the experiment.

While there's no limit to the number of headline variants that can be tested, remember that an experiment's progress will be slower the more headlines are added.

Simply select 'start' to begin testing.

Active and completed tests

To monitor the progress of a test, select the pin next to the headline currently being tested. Active headlines experiments will be indicated with a pie chart representing the number of headlines being tested and the play percentage of each headline. Headlines with a higher play percentage are ones that are performing better.

Editing tests, adding variants, removing variants, and editing the copy of headline variants will automatically stop and restart the test.

A test ends when the winning headline has been determined with 95% confidence and Chartbeat begins to automatically serve that headline 100% of the time.

To make sure that tests come to a conclusion as efficiently as possible, we have an alternate way to determine a winner, called 'soft convergence'. If 20 minutes have passed and we're 95% confident that no headline is better by a margin of 25%, the leading headline will win.

As we find winning headlines for your active tests, our code begins serving this headline on your homepage to 100% of new visitors to the page. At this point, you may decide that it's best practice for your team to manually end the test by changing the original headline to the winning headline variant in your CMS.

To end an active headline test at any point, open the Heads Up Display pin for that headline, and in the 'Headline Testing' tab, select 'stop'. Or, in the Headline Testing results page, headlines that are autoplaying have a green play button next to them. Hover over this button to reveal the red 'Stop' button depicted in the screenshot below.

Test Results view

The results view shows you all currently running, completed, and canceled tests, as well as a series of overview metrics to help you better understand how much of an impact you're making on your traffic, and what your results can teach you about your audience.

From the Heads Up Display, select Headline Testing Results at the bottom of the dock, from the Heads Up Display pop-out menu, or select Headline Testing under the Optimization tab from the left-hand navigation.

Past 7 Days

The top of the page visualization shows your total number of completed tests from the past seven daysbroken out into two sections. On the left, the pie chart shows you the percentage of the time that original or alternative headlines won, as well as how often tests resulted in no winner.

The bar graph in the middle takes the breakdown of original vs. alternative winner and splits it over the course of the past week, so you can see on a day by day basis which headlines won more often.

The right-hand module surfaces the Average CTR Increase for the week. This number tells you how the average CTR of this weeks winning headlines compare to CTR of the original headline variants. At a glance, it informs you how much more click-through activity youre getting as a result of your headline testing.

All Tests

Beneath the top-of-page metrics, you can see details on all your active and past 50 headline tests. Active tests all update in real time as they happen, and offer the option to cancel the test. Whereas active tests show a running count of how long its been playing and how many trials are being served for each option, completed tests show how long it played for, and the total number of trials for each variant.

The bar graphs in the middle of the card display the ratio of quality clicks to total CTR for each headline. The right-hand number is the percent of viewers who, after being served that headline variant, clicked through to that article page. The percent of that group who successfully clicked through and spent 15 seconds of engaged time are expressed with the percent on the left.

For example, this winning headline (above) was served to a total of 39,084 unique visitors, and 1.12% of those people who saw it clicked through to the article. Of those people who clicked through, 83% engaged for at least 15 seconds.

On the right-hand side, each test also lists its status (active, winner found, no winner found, or canceled), the CTR Increase for completed tests, who created the test, and the page it ran on.

Completed tests also mark the winning headline in green, and if that winning headline is beingautoplayed on your page, with a green playing icon. Select the playing icon to stop the autoplay and revert to playing the original headline to all new, unique visitors to the page.

Export Options

If you want to run deeper analysis on your headline testing results, beneath the CTR Increase module you can export all your results data as either of two CSVs.

The Tests.csv is a summary of every testyou'verun, giving you insight into how many variants is the optimal number for your site, which user is running the most (or best) tests, or which section is running the most (or best) tests.

The other format, Headlines.csv is a breakdown of how every headline variant performed within every testyou'veever run. Use this option to dive into characteristics of winning headlines like character count, words, and language.

For teams that are familiar with using Google Analytics Real-Time prior to gaining access to Chartbeat, we frequently receive questions about discrepancies between visitor counts between the tools, specifically between Chartbeat's Real-Time Concurrents metric and Google Analytics Real-Time's Active User count. Both of these metrics aim to deliver the total number of current visitors to a given site, but differences in our measurement methodologies can cause significant discrepancies between the platforms. To better understand these differences, let's begin with the basic metric definitions.

Chartbeat Concurrents: The total number of people on your site at any given moment, as measured by the number of open browsing sessions to your site. Note that this number includes both engaged and non-engaged browsing sessions open to your site. An engaged session in Chartbeat represents an active user session where the visitor has directly engaged (clicking, scrolling, typing, mousing) with your page in the last 15 seconds. A non-engaged session represents an open browser tab to your site where the visitor has not shown any signs of engagement within the last 15 seconds. If an open browser session to your site shows no signs of engagement for two continuous hours, we will stop tracking the session as a concurrent at that point.

Google Analytics Real-Time Active Users: Google Analytics defines Real-Time active users as follows: a unique user who has triggered an event or pageview within the past 5 minutes.If a user has multiple pages open to your site in the same browser, these sessions will be counted as a single active user in Google Analytics Real-Time.

The key difference to understand most discrepancies between these systems boils down to these differences in real-time metric methodologies. Chartbeat tracking code checks in with each open session to your site, effectively asking each person on your site "where are you and what are you doing now?". This enables us to give a uniquely accurate assessment of how many active visits are occurring at any one moment in time as we know precisely when a given page session ends, whereas Google tracking does not capture this.

Google Analytics (GA) works differently. It simply receives data every time a page is loaded or a custom tracking event is triggered. From these pageview events, until the next page load on your site, Google is blind to what these visitors are doing on your site. This means they can have difficulty assessing what a user does after they reach a page, or if they are even still there at all.

In Google Analytics Real-Time, if a visitor leaves your site before 5 minutes by closing their current browser tab or returning to their previous referring website, Google will continue counting this visitor as an active user for the full five minutes. If a visitor stays on your site for longer than 5 minutes, they will vanish from Google's Real-Time user count, even if the visitor is still on your site.

What does this mean?

If Google's active users are greater than Chartbeat's concurrents:

This is probably because Google Analytics Real-Time is counting active users who are no longer on your site. If you have content that is only holding people for a short period of time, we'll remove these visitors from your total concurrent count immediately after they leave the page by closing their browser tab to your site or returning to their previous referring website like Google Search or Facebook. GA Real-Time always assumes these visitors are sticking for around 5 minutes. If 100 people visit a page but only 20 stay, Chartbeat will only show those 20 open browser sessions whereas Google Real-Time will show you 100. This can cause very significant discrepancies, especially for sites with high mobile and less desktop traffic, as mobile visitors less frequently leave open browser tabs to your site that Chartbeat would continue to count as non-engaged concurrents on desktop.

If Google's active users are smaller than Chartbeat's concurrents:

This is less common, but if you experience this discrepancy, it's likely due to GA Real-Time dropping off visitor sessions after 5 minutes where in reality, some or all of these visitors are still on your site. Our tracking script allows us to continue tracking desktop sessions open to your site for visitors who continue to engage after GA's 5 minute limitation. If 100 people visit a page on your site with video and continue engaging past the 5 minute mark, they will vanish from Google's report after 5 minutes; Chartbeat will continue tracking these 100 sessions. The resulting discrepancy is more common for sites with large amounts of desktop traffic as these page sessions tend to last longer than mobile sessions.

Measure different. Know more.

At its core, the numbers can be different because what we are tracking is different. We believe the power of real-time data is that it allows you to understand what people are doing on your site, not just that they were there recently. Chartbeat is about people and their actions; today that's knowing why a page is working, tomorrow it's making it happen again.

NOTE:While it's more common that the differences in metrics between these systems as described above is responsible for publisher discrepancies, it's also possible that misaligned tracking implementations between these systems causes the discrepancy experienced by your team.Check to ensure that both systems are measuring the same platforms, and if not, consider adjusting your tracking strategy to ensure alignment across systems. The team responsible for implementing Google Analytics and Chartbeat tracking at your organization are best suited to review these implementations and make changes (if needed) to bring the systems into alignment.

Chartbeat has distinct integrations available for standard websites (including webview-based apps), single page web apps, AMP pages, Facebook's Instant Articles, native app tracking for Android and iOS apps,and other sources of reader engagement which may not be tracked by other analytics systems.

Concurrents:The total number of people on your site at any given moment, as measured by thenumber of simultaneous open browsing sessions to your site.

Note that this number includes both engaged and non-engaged browsing sessions open to your site. An engaged session in Chartbeat represents an active user session where the visitor has directly engaged (clicking, scrolling, typing, mousing) with your page in the last 15 seconds. A non-engaged session represents an open browser tab to your site where the visitor has not shown any signs of engagement within the last 15 seconds. If an open browser session to your site shows no signs of engagement for two continuous hours, we will stop tracking the session as a concurrent at that point.

Pageview: An instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser, or other platforms where Chartbeat tracking is implemented. Pageviews is a cumulative metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.

Note that a single user can record multiple pageviews in the same browsing session; if a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well. Pageview and Unique impression running totals in the Real-Time Dashboard begin at midnight (12:00:00am) in the time zone that your domain is set to.

Between analytics systems, it is expected there will be some discrepancy in the traffic data collected by each unique platform. When the discrepancy falls outside of expected ranges, say above 15% variance between each tool, this can cause confusion for users who receive traffic reports from different platforms; for example, Chartbeat and Google Analytics or Adobe. This article is intended to help teams experiencing traffic data discrepancies between Chartbeat and other measurement platforms to effectively troubleshoot these discrepancies, understand the underlying causes, and potentially reconcile the differences.

Understand how Chartbeat measures compared your other Analytics tool

Let's begin with what constitutes a pageview and a unique (or "unique visitor") in Chartbeat...

Pageview: An instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser or application with Chartbeat tracking implemented. Note that a single user can record multiple pageviews in the same browsing session; if a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

Unique:Unique users is a metric defined as the total number of users that have visited a page, group of pages, or site. Technically, it's the count of all unique cookie ids over a certain period of time.

NOTE:there are technical limitations and dependancies for each of these metrics, detailed at the bottom of this article.

Step-by-Step Troubleshooting Guide

The team(s) responsible for implementing the various analytics tools at your organization are best suited to determine the cause for a particular discrepancy between your measurement systems, so we ask that you begin by following the below steps with those individuals at your org closest to your Chartbeat and Google/Adobe tracking code.

STEP 1: Ensure you are pulling the correct data from Chartbeat

At this point, you've already accessed a pageviews or uniques report in Chartbeat and identified a significant inconsistency with a corresponding report from your other analytics platform. When pulling corresponding reports from separate platforms, it's important to carefully consider all of the factors which impact the returned data. For example, getting the query start & end date right and ensuring that each tool is pulling data for the same time zone is an essential first step.

If you are accessing historical pageview data from Chartbeat, chances are you are using either our Historical Dashboard or our Advanced Queries tool. To ensure that you're accessing the correct data from our various historical reporting tools, we first recommend performing identical queries across both of these tools (if possible) to ensure that the discrepant data you've accessed is consistent within our own platform. Note that our Advanced Queries tool is only available for organizations using our Plus and Premium service plans. If your org does not have access to Advanced Queries, you can skip this step and move directly to STEP 2 below.

If your Advanced Queries report deals with site-wide pageviews:

Perform a corresponding query in our Historical Dashboard

NOTE: there is an expected discrepancy between these systems of around 0.1%

If you find a significant discrepancy for the site-wide pageview totals between these tools:

Ensure the date ranges and timezones match for each query

If the discrepancy is insignificant (near 0.1% variance), skip to STEP 2 below

If your Advanced Queries report deals with section or author level pageview totals:

Perform a corresponding query in our Historical Dashboard

NOTE: there is an expected discrepancy between these systems of around 0.1%

If you find a significant discrepancy for the site-wide pageview totals between these tools:

Ensure the date ranges and timezones match for each query

If your AQ report uses the 'Section' or 'Author' group or filter, try running the same report using the corresponding "Dynamic Section/Author" group or filter available in the Advanced Queries interface and via direct calls to the API endpoint

If the discrepancy is insignificant (near 0.1% variance), skip to STEP 2 below

STEP 2: Review our 'common causes for discrepancies between analytics systems' list below with the team(s) responsible for implementing both measurement platforms

CAUSE: Chartbeat and Adobe/Google Analytics are implemented across unique platforms. SOLUTION: Check to ensure that both systems are measuring the same platforms. If not, adjust your tracking strategy or change the data pull to ensure alignment across systems.

Chartbeat has distinct integrations available for standard websites (including webview-based apps), single page web apps, AMP pages, Facebook's Instant Articles, native app tracking for Android and iOS apps,and other sources of reader engagement which may not be tracked by other analytics systems (GA, Adobe).

Its a relatively common source of pageview discrepancies if the report youre pulling in Chartbeat does not match the other system you are using because theres a difference in the the specific inventory being measured. This is one of the first items to check whenever you see a discrepancy.

CAUSE: Google/Adobe is implemented by your analytics team to track custom visitor click events like embedded photo gallery click-through.SOLUTION: Understand the differences between event-based pageview tracking and Chartbeat tracking.

By default, our system records a pageview the first time our tracking script is called on a page, once per unique page session. If your site makes use of dynamic page load with single page app architecture or infinite scroll, it's best practice to use our virtualPage implementation to ensure that we capture unique pageviews each time a visitor loads a new article page on your site without full DOM refresh. Each time the vitualPage function is called, we count another pageview. If virtualPage is not implemented on your site, we will not track pageviews for dynamically loaded article content.

GA and Adobe are event based trackers which allow you to register pageviews on custom visitor events like clicking through embedded photo galleries. This type of action will not be counted toward pageviews in Chartbeat by default.

CAUSE: Chartbeat and Google/Adobe tracking scripts do not load at the same time upon a visitor's initial page load for your site. SOLUTION: Work with the team responsible for implementing your analytics tools to understand and reconcile differences between the integrations of each system (Chartbeat vs Google Analytics or Adobe tracking tags).

Best practice is to ensure that your tracking scripts load simultaneously. For web tracking, your website may utilize our old code which loads our tracking script (chartbeat.js or chartbeat_video.js) on window.onload. Our new recommended web tracking code loads the tracking script asynchronously in the header, which is in line with Google Analytics' default web tracking implementation instructions.

We recommend adjusting your GA/Adobe/Chartbeat tag implementations to ensure these tracking scripts load at the same time. For pages where our tracking script still loads on window.onload, this can cause our system to miss pageviews that are very brief, ending prior to page load completion and thereby evading our tracking. Ensuring that our script loads in parity with your Adobe/GA tracking script will prevent this resulting discrepancy.

STEP 3: Adjust your comparison reports and/or Chartbeat code implementation based on your findings from STEP 2 to reconcile the differences between your analytics platforms

If your team finds that...

(A) ...Chartbeat and Adobe/GA are implemented across unique platforms, consider adjusting your implementations to track the same platforms.

(B) ...Adobe/GA are implemented to register additional pageviews outside of standard page load, adjust the report in your other analytics program to correspond with Chartbeat pageviews.

(C) ...Chartbeat and Adobe/GA scripts do not load at the same time, consider adjusting your implementations to ensure parity between your tracking script timing in relation to page load on your site.

Pageviews and Uniques metric specifications

As our system relies on device/browser specific cookies to identify unique visitors, we are unable to track a consistent unique visitor across:

multiple browsers

unique distribution channels (AMP, Facebook IA, native app, standard web)

unique subdomains on your website

This means that a single individual who views your content across multiple browsers, distribution channels, or subdomains of your website will be registered as multiple uniques in Chartbeat.

Pageviews will only be tracked in Chartbeat upon initial load of our tracking script (chartbeat.js or chartbeat_video.js) for a visitor on a given page, OR when our virtualPage function is called to register a dynamic page load event in your single page app.

Both metrics are inherently reliant on the quality of your Chartbeat tracking code implementation to capture data for your complete audience.

The Chartbeat Slack integration makes it impossible for newsroom teams to not be connected to their contents performance across all their communication platforms. After you connect your companys Slack with your Chartbeat Publishing account, youll start receiving updates and alerts as they happen and be able to use unique Chartbeat slash commands to ask real-time questions about your content's performance.

How to Set it Up

If you are the Account Owner, youll be able to set up the integration.If youre not sure who the account owner is at your organization, please contact to your Customer Success Manager or to the Chartbeat Support team at [email protected].

First head over to the new Integrations tab in your Settings page at https://chartbeat.com/publishing/settings/integrate/.

Slacks support doc

Next, select the Connect button under the Slack icon and youll be redirected to the Slack page and guided through the process. You will be prompted to enter or confirm your companys Slack credentials and Slack will take care of the rest.

How to Use it

Once the Account Owner enables the integration, each individual login can create notification rules and be able to use slash commands to get specific Chartbeat information posted directly into Slack channels.

Notifications

Teams can be notified when:

a spike alert goes off

a Report Builder report completes

(Coming soon) an Engaged Headline Test completes with winner information

Slash Commands

Use the slash command /chartbeat to get traffic updates directly from Chartbeat. If youre not familiar with Slacks slash commands, check out .

The basic structure for the /chartbeat command is as follows, but is completely customizable to reflect your sites unique sections, authors, and more:

/chartbeat METRIC on HOST where FILTER is FILTER_VALUE

Some examples would be:

/chartbeat what are the top pages on yourdomain.com

/chartbeat how many people are currently on yourdomain.com

/chartbeat how much traffic is on storieswhere section is business

/chartbeat how much traffic on yourdomain.com was referrered by facebook.com

/chartbeat how much traffic on yourdomain.com is from social sources

Client-side time is the time zone that the person who's loading the page is in. It's based off the local time that their computer is set in.

For example if someone loads an article at 12:00pm (EST) in New York City, their client-side time is 12:00. At that same moment, someone in London would load that page at 5:00pm (BST) and their client-side time would be logged at 5:00pm.

UTC is a standardized way to denoting time across all time zones, used interchangeably with Greenwhich Mean Time.

Our Heads Up Display provides page-level user scroll depth data at a glance, but you can also access this data from our Advanced Queries tool using our "Scroll Depth Histogram" group. This article explains how to create a heat map of your historical visitor scroll data for a given page on your site using Advanced Queries with Google Sheets.

Report Setup

We have many pre-populated templates in our Advanced Queries tool. Click the "Use a template" button on the right side of the Advanced Queries tool to see all the options available, then select " Article scroll depth " to populate the query data with the following parameters:

sample report here Metrics

Pageviews:Will return the total number of pageviews for your selected page path and date range, grouped by 100-pixel buckets, representing the maximum distance scrolled from the top of the page for each unique pageview session

Group

Scroll depth histogram: Histogram of the number of pixels scrolled, in 100-pixel buckets

Filters

Device: Choose which device you'd like to view from mobile, desktop, and tablet. You can also use the Device group instead and return results for mobile, desktop, and tablet in one report (Tip: Bump the row limit up to 1000 or more!)

Page Path: Set this to a single page path, like your homepage

After running the query, your report should return data in the following format:

scroll_hist

page_views

0

35214

100

2114

200

1647

300

988

400

858

500

799

600

844

700

1009

800

1052

900

989

1000

1285

1100

1335

1200

1353

1300

1089

Create your scroll depth heat map in Google Sheets

Import the CSV export into a new Google Sheets file. Add a third column using the followingformula to represent your pageviews-by-scroll-depth data as the percentage of pageviews that resulted in user scroll equal to or greater thanthe corresponding 100-pixel scroll depth in the scroll_hist column:

(SUM OF ALL PVS minus SUM OF PVs THROUGH THE CURRENT CELL) over SUM OF ALL PVs

You will need to sum the total pageviews from the page_views column in order to create this formula in Google Sheets. To view an example of this formula in action within Google Sheets, find the link to our sample heat map report at the bottom of this article.

When this formula is correctly applied to your new column in Google Sheets to represent percentage of pageviews by distance scrolled down the page, you can add an extra visualization layer to this data with color scale conditional formatting:

In Google Sheets, clickFormat > Conditional Formatting...

Next, apply a Color scale to your percentage range and select your desired color format...

Your scroll depth heat map is complete! To view an example completed heat map report in Google sheets, find our .

Question:

Why does my Advanced Queries report grouped by Dynamic Title include some rows where the title field is empty?

Answer:

Rows with empty fields under the Dynamic Title column in your Advanced Query csv export represent visitor sessions to your site where our tracking script was not able to collect the page title. The Dynamic Title parameter was designed to enable reporting on unique title variants received for content on your site, such that a story with multiple titles over time will be returned as multiple rows. As a result, for visitor sessions where our tracker was not able to collect the page title at all, these views will also be grouped together in a row with no value for the Dynamic Title field. For this reason, seeing some blank titles in your Advanced Queries data is expected, andwe tend to recommend using the Page Path group instead of the Dynamic Title group for most queries where the aim is to export summary traffic data grouped by page.

Viewing empty titles in your reports does not necessarily indicate an issue with your Chartbeat implementation; your report is simply providing the full range of data, and it's possible that some visitors are accessing your page in a way that prevents the title from being accessible by our tracking script. If your query indicates that many of your visitor sessions are missing associated page title data, it may be worth reviewing your Chartbeat tracking configuration, detailed below, with the team responsible for your analytics code.

For some background, our standard website tracking obtains titles automatically from the 'document.title' element on the page. If your team would prefer, you can also choose to utilize our optional title configuration in order to reduce the occurrence of missing titles from visitor sessions. It is important to note that our tracking integrations on other platforms may attain titles from different elements you can find more information form our integration docs as well as Virtual Page FAQ, AMP documentation, and our FBIA documentation.

What is Site Context?

Site Context is a real-time metric that benchmarks the concurrents of an article on a given site within the context of all articles appearing on that site, and scores it from 0-10 based on that context.

For example, if you looked at an article published on xyz.com on Wednesday at 1pm, a Site Context of 0 means an article is performing worse than how articles on xyz.com normally perform on a Wednesday at 1pm. A Site Context of 10 would mean an article is over-performing compared to how articles normally perform on xyz.com at that time.

General rule:

Score 0-1 indicates under performance

Scores 1-2 indicates average performance i.e your article is performing as expected

Scores 3-7 indicates better than average in increasing scale

Scores 8-10 indicate overperformance

How is it calculated?

Site Context works off of a site-level model based on concurrents by hour of day and day of week, over the last 4 weeks.

It is calculated by comparing the concurrents of an article with respect to a benchmark

and scores it from 0 to 10 based on how close to the benchmark the article lies in.

Note: The benchmarking methodology used to calculate Site Context works on an article level, and does not apply to landing pages.

How is the benchmark created?

Site Context benchmark is calculated in real time by comparing the concurrents for *articles* (and not landing pages) for the past 4 weeks on the hour of day and day of week for the site it belongs to. Next, we construct the distribution function from these and compare the performance of articles with this distribution.

if it is higher than the upper tail of the distribution, then we score it an 8 -10 i.e that article as over-performing or if it is lower end of the distribution we score it 0-1.

The 'Email, apps, IM' referrer category represents all sessions where the visitor navigated to their current article page from another unknown page or mobile app where no referrer data is made available to the analytics trackers in your site like Google, Adobe, and Chartbeat. This category can also be thought of as "dark social" or "direct social" traffic; visitors who arrived via emails, apps, IMs, or other platforms and webpages that do not permit the transfer of referrer data to your site.

We do not categorize this traffic as Direct traffic like Google Analytics does because we think it's useful to separately categorize these two very different visitor behaviors: (1 / Direct) visitors who navigate directly to your homepage or other landing pages are typically using a bookmark or typing your domain name into the browser's URL bar, versus (2 / Direct-Social) visitors that are directly referred via a link from some unknown platform or website that does not permit the transfer of referrer data in the network request to your site.

If your team uses UTM codes to track clicks to your site from various promotion channels like email newsletters to your subscribers, you can use our UTM tracking capabilities to view these traffic insights in our Real-time Dashboard and Advanced Queries.

Reports Dashboard

Start each day with relevant site, section, and author data through recurring email reports containing unique auto-generated insights fueled by Chartbeat data science. Reports include visualizations and automated insights from your engagement data in an easy-to-digest email format. Quickly see and explore the vital patterns and correlations that inform your business decisions.

Report Templates

Creating Reports

Main Metrics

Automated Insights

Engagement Trend

Top Stories

Report Templates

Site:High-level site overview of the previous days numbers.

Section:A look at an individual section's performance.

Author:Stories performance, filtered by byline.

Creating Reports

First, navigate to your

Hover over one of the available report templates and click "Create":

Select the available options in each template, and click "Create". All done! Your report will now be sent to the email address associated with your Chartbeat account.

Main Metrics

Engaged Minutes displays thetotal number of engaged minutes that all visitors spent actively interacting with the given site, section, or author's content for the previous day.

Pageviews,defined as the total number of pages viewed for the given site, section, or author.

Avg. Engaged Time displays the average time in seconds visitors are spending actively interacting with your content: including scrolls, clicks, mouse movements, touch events, and keystrokes. We track reader activity every second and report engagement stats back to our servers every 15 seconds, through the Chartbeat JS that is deployed when our code loads. Historical Avg Engaged Time is equal to Total Engaged Minutes divided by Pageviews.

Automated Insights

Every daily report features a Yesterday's insights section, highlighting noteworthy insights on yesterday's audience, including traffic & referrer trends, high performing stories, and more.

Engagement Trend

Reports also include an engaged minute trendline throughout the day for your sites, sections, and top performing stories in your author reports. You can find your engaged minutes broken out by traffic source in this section as well.

Top Stories

Site & Section Reports both include a list of your top 10 stories by total engaged time. View total engaged minutes, pageviews, and average engaged time for each of your top performing articles, alongside publish date & time and author name. Each page title is linked directly to a page detail view in our Historical Dashboard to dive deeper on your traffic data for a particular story and better understand your content's reach by traffic source, visitor loyalty type, and device type.

Top stories are also included in our Author Reports with even more detail, including:

All-time engaged minutes, pageviews & average engaged time for stories that were published prior to yesterday

Engagement trend lines for each story

Top off-site social posts by total interactions (likes, shares, retweets, etc), powered by CrowdTangle

Look for our insight badges like 'High Social' or 'Low Mobile' in your list of top stories. Insight badges specifically compare traffic and engagement for different segments (social, mobile, search, etc.) in the previous time period to the current time period-- same day last week for daily reports. If it's a Tuesday, and one of yesterday's stories sawengagement that falls above the 90th percentile for your top stories on Monday of the previous week, we call that out with a "High" insight badge in your Site Report. If another story saw engagement below the 10th percentile, we call that out with a "Low" badge.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European regulation adopted by the European Commission on data protection and privacy for the benefit of individuals located in the European Union. In short, it provides comprehensive data privacy protection for the personal data of EU individuals, focusing on transparency, accountability and the rights of data subjects.

For more details on Chartbeat's approach GDPR and how we protect personal data please visit our GDPR readiness page.

Data Security Policy details at chartbeat.com/data-security-policy/

What is Chartbeats approach to data?

One of the earliest decisions Chartbeat made as a business, and one which we've stuck to steadfastly over the years, is to build our products with user privacy as a top priority.

In light of GDPR, we have been diligently doing a re-evaluation of all of our data security, privacy, storage and data handling procedures, and working to improve and strengthen those (already strong) practices.

Beyond our product, Chartbeat is also evaluating our data privacy and security practices around standard business operations (such as marketing, finance and sales) to ensure that we are GDPR compliant now and in the future.

Does Chartbeat track personal data?

In terms of the data we collect on behalf of our customers, Chartbeats service is what GDPR refers to as a Data Processor. In acting as such, Chartbeat obtains user internet protocol (IP) addresses and certain other online identifiers which constitute Personal Data under the GDPRs broad definition.

Chartbeats products are designed to provide full functionality to our customers without needing any identifying information about our customers website visitors such as the name, email address or any similar information. We do not collect or store such information. Further, as a matter of data security and privacy, we also do not collect or store any sensitive or special categories of Personal Data.

What are IP addresses and why does Chartbeat obtain them?

Every computer and device connected to the Internet is assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses, which need to be used by websites for the Internet to function, enable information to pass between computers and servers, while also giving website owners a sense of the location their visitors are coming from. This helps companies provide services, protect data and abide by regulations.

Chartbeat uses IP addresses in order to provide our service. When visitors browse on websites using Chartbeat, Chartbeat code transmits information about what was read to our servers. This communication between browser and server necessarily involves IP addresses, as all Internet communication does. We use IP addresses to handle that data transmission. After receipt of this data, we strip identifying information from the IP addresses by masking the last octet, and use this masked IP address to identify the city and country in which a visitor is based. We then delete masked IP addresses from our systems within two hours of receipt. We do not use IP addresses in any other part of our system.

In technical terms, this means that each IPs final octet is converted to 000 before being processed by Chartbeat's systems and is never written to disk. Conversion to 000 prevents the address from being used to track back to an individual host.

Does Chartbeat set cookies?

Chartbeat does not set third-party cookies. We also do not take any steps to identify specific visitors (for example, we do not do browser fingerprinting or collect device IDs).

There are two types of cookies: first-party cookies and third-party cookies. First-party cookies are controlled by website owners, and they are specific to that particular website.Third-party cookies, by contrast, are set by third parties and may be used to track visitors between domains.

Chartbeat was designed with privacy in mind, and is a first party analytics platform. This means that publishers who use our service can set first party cookies on their sites using Chartbeat code, or they can run in cookieless mode. However, Chartbeat does not, under any circumstances, set third-party cookies on our publishers sites.

Will Chartbeat enter into a Data Processing Agreement ("DPA") with me?

Yes, we would be happy to enter into a DPA with our partners who provide service to individuals in the EU. Most customers will find the relevant terms in the Data Processing Addendum of our updated Terms of Service document.

For customers who have a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with us, Chartbeat also has a Data Processing Addendum available to accompany the MSA. Please contact your customer success manager or send your inquiry to [email protected].

How can I adjust the controls that I have over the data I share with Chartbeat?

Chartbeat customers have the ability to manage and adjust controls over data they share with Chartbeat. Additionally, publishers can modify Chartbeat data settings, including running Chartbeat in cookieless mode.

Please note that the only way to enter cookieless mode is for a developer to change the way that Chartbeat's code is implemented across the entire domain.

Refer to our documentation guide or contact [email protected] if you have specific requests.

Pages of your site that received very low traffic compared to your site's total traffic might not display in our Historical Dashboard. For a page to display in the 'Your Top Stories' list in Historical, it must meet the following criteria:

The page must be recognized as an article by our page classification algorithm. Landing pages such as homepages and section front pages do not have their own page-detail views in Historical and are not included in your Top Stories lists.

For any given hour within the last 3-4 months (or the full queryable date range available in your Historical Dashboard), the page must have been one of the top 500 articles on your site by total pageviews and engaged time that hour. Any pages that never received enough traffic to be in the top 500 pages by views in a given hour will not be written to the database that powers Historical.

When viewing the Historical Dashboard with a particular date range selected, it will not display pages that had less than 1/1000 or <0.1% of pageviews than the total pageviews received by your site for the selected date range.

These low-traffic thresholds are in place to ensure the dashboard loads quickly in your browser, and to filter out potentially undesired page results from your dashboard, like pages on your staff-only staging site that receive extremely minimal views.

How to Sign In

Open the Chartbeat mobile app OR visit the chartbeat.com homepage and click the SIGN IN button in the upper right corner of your browser window.

Enter your email address OR username

Enter your password and click SIGN IN

Forgot your password?Head to chartbeat.com/forgotpw/ and enter your email address to receive a link to reset your password. If you do not receive an email shortly after, follow these steps before getting in touch with our team to further troubleshoot.

Adding a new site to your company's Chartbeat account can only be performed by the designated organization owner on your account. Upon signing in, this user can navigate to Settings >Sites >and then select theAdd a New Sitebuttonto get started. For organization owners, here is a quick link to the Sites page.

Should you encounter any errors in the Add a New Site steps, OR if your login does not have organization owner status to be able to access this page, feel free to reach out to get in touch with us at [email protected].

Removing a Site cannot be completed by the organization owner or admin users at this time. In order to permanently remove a Site from your team's Chartbeat account, please reach out to the Technical Solutions team at [email protected] with the Site(s) that should be deleted-- we're happy to help.

Compare Plans

Take a look! To learn more about pricing, get in touch with our sales team at [email protected].

Features

BASIC

PLUS

PREMIUM

User Logins

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Real-Time & Historical Dashboards

Heads Up Display

Reports

Big Board

Slack Integration

Advanced Queries

Choose ONE Premium feature

Headline Testing

Choose ONE Premium feature

Multi-Site View

Choose ONE Premium feature

Add Ons

Native App Integration -Pull app traffic into the Real-time Dashboard to learn whats resonating with your most loyal audience on a second-by-second basis which sectionsthey'reengaging with, how push alerts draw their interest, and more.

Video Dashboard -Grasp how your video content is capturing viewer attention in real-time so you can capitalize on distribution opportunities.

Log-Level Reporting Service - Direct access to the data collected from all visitorinteractions on a page, transferred directly to your data warehouse. With Log-level, youll have detailed history about visitor interactions with your content, and can use this data for additional analysis by connecting it to other internal business intelligence platforms. With Chartbeats almost-instantaneous delivery of the data, youll be able to make informed decisions about business operations beyond publishing in much less time.

Chartbeat for Everyone users can head over to Chartbeat Receipts Page to view current receipts.

If you're paying by invoice, and need a copies of your past payments, please contact our Billing Team by sending an email to [email protected].

This usually happens because you have tried to sign up for Chartbeat in the past using that domain. Unfortunately, we'll need to fix this manually for you. Please contact the Chartbeat Support ( [email protected] ) and we'll be happy to take care of it.

Introduction

UTM parameters enable marketers, social media editors and content creators to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing and/or content campaigns across traffic sources and media channels. When a person clicks a link that contains a URL with UTM parameters, web analytics on the destination website interpret the parameter information and attribute it to the person's website session.

Where is it?

In the Real-Time Dashboard, the Traffic module can now be toggled to show Traffic by UTM, letting users filter for the number of concurrents on site who arrived via URLs with UTM Source or Medium parameters.

Now, it's easier than ever to track UTM codes and view engagement through the lens of your campaigns.

How do I use it?

Real-time UTM monitoring differentiates some of the more custom external channels from the catch-all 'dark social' -- for example, newsletters. Now, audience builders can see who arrives on their site via a newsletter (or any other unique channel) and get more context on which topics they read, how long they engage for, and whether they recirculate.

Analysts can use it to differentiate paid vs organic traffic especially as UTM traffic is also tracked historically in Advanced Queries. Setuprecurring reports to always stay on top of trends.

At a higher level, publishers who are are reliant on content partnerships can use analysts reports to make strategic decisions about what to promote and where.

Social editors can use it to track content partnerships through social posts.

Marketers who need to quantify the impact of banner ads can use it to better target content to interested readers.

Audience growth and development can use it to instantly understand newsletter reach and engagement.

Every Chartbeat user has a role which determines their level of access to your organization's data and determines which actions they can take on Chartbeat.

ROLES

Owner

Owners are the primary managers of their Chartbeat organization. They have the highest level of permissions and therefore are allowed additional privileges which other users do not have access to. Owners have access to all tools included in their plan, and data for all of their organizations sites. Owners are the only users who can add new sites and manage their organizations existing site settings.

Admin

Like owners, admins have access to all tools included in their plan, and data for all of their organizations sites. They can also invite new users to their organization, manage member permissions, and promote/demote other admins.

Member

Members get access to sites and tools granted to them by their organizations admins. This is the default role for all users. Learn more about managing user permissions.

PERMISSIONS

Available by default

Available based on access assigned by an Organization Owner or Admin

Organization Management

Owner

Admin

Member

Change a user's name**

Change user email addresses**

Invite new members

Deactivate a member's account

Delete a members account

Promote an Admin

Demote an Admin

** On another persons behalf

Dashboard Management

Owner

Admin

Member

Add and Remove Sites

Create Multi-Site Views

Edit Multi-Site Views

Remove Multi-Site Views

Data Access/Management

Owner

Admin

Member

See site data

Run Headline Tests

Grant access to Site and Multi-Site data

Remove access to Site and Multi-Site data

Grant access to Publishing Tools

Remove access to Publishing Tools

To query traffic data for a specific article in Advanced Queries, you can use our 'page path' filter as shown below:

there may not be any data available yet in Advanced Queries

When using this filter, it's important to enter the precise page path (URL) that our tracking script collects from your website when visitors load the page.

As a first step, remove the protocol ("https://") and "www." characters from the front of the canonical page URL that you want to query.

Next, make sure you use the correct page path format. Each site that we track follows one of two formats for how we collect and store the website's page paths; with or without the domain name. The default setting is to include the domain name in the page path, so for example:

domain.com/page-path-here.html

sub.domain.com/page-path-here.html

Some sites have Chartbeat configured to use page paths without the domain included:

/page-path-here.html

There are two ways you can determine which of these path formats to use for the site you are querying...

Option 1: In the Advanced Queries builder, add any metric (e.g. Pageviews) and the Page path group, then click "Preview data". This will return path sample data that shows which type of page path formatting to use in your path filtered queries.

Option 2: Hover over any article in the Top Pages list of your Real-Time Dashboard to see the page path format used for this site. Remember, you're checking to see if the path we collect for your site includes or does not include the domain portion of the page URL, "yoursite.com".

If you don't see any data in your Advanced Queries report after running a query with the page path filter, please check that the formatting of your path is accurate. If the article was published on the same day that you are running a report, .

New sites added to your Chartbeat account will default to US Eastern time zone. Only the organization owner associated with your account can make changes to your sites' time zone settings. To change a site's time zone as the organization owner:

1. Select Settings from the upper right-hand drop-down menu after signing in to chartbeat.com

[email protected]

2.Select the Sitespage from the left-hand nav, only visible to organization owners

3.Locate the site(s) that should receive a new time zone, and select the preferred time zone from the drop-down menu

4.Click the save button to save your changes

If your user account is not the organization owner, make the request to the Chartbeat owner at your org to perform these steps, or get in touch with and we'll be happy to assist with this update.

The password reset link in your Welcome to Chartbeatinvite email will expire after 7 days. If this happens, clicking on this link will direct you to a page to generate a new Reset Password link :

Note:Make sure the email address inputted into this field matches the address in the "to:" field of your Welcome to Chartbeat email in case you have multiple work email addresses. The address you enter here needs to match exactly the address used by your Chartbeat admin when they created your user account.

Supported Platforms

Currently, Chartbeat Video tracking is only supported for our standard website tracking integration. Though we offer unique visitor tracking integrations for other platforms like AMP, Facebook Instant, and native apps, we cannot provide video engagement analytics for those separate platform integrations at this time.

If you are a current customer and this functionality is important to your team, we'd like to hear from you! Shoot us a note at [email protected].

Unsupported Platforms

Video player engagement tracking is not supported for the following platform integrations:

Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA)

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Chartbeat Native App SDK (iOS and Android)

Supported OVPs

Chartbeat offers plugin support for the following OVPs:

JW Player

Brightcove

Youtube

Flowplayer

Kaltura

Ooyala

Chartbeat also offers a Javascript Video SDK for use with video players not listed above:

Chartbeat Video Javascript SDK

Not receiving emails from Chartbeat? We're here to help! Follow the steps below, and get in touch with our team if you're still having trouble ( [email protected] ).

Step 1: Check your email settings

If you're signed in to Chartbeat already, navigate to the Settings by hovering over the profile icon in the upper right corner of your screen and selecting Settings from the menu.

In the Profile page, double-check that your email address is correct. If your Chartbeat logins is a personal login (not shared), you can update your email address on this page by entering the new address and clicking Save.

If you're using a shared login, this may prevent you from receiving Chartbeat emails directly to your inbox. Get in touch with your account administrator(s) to request an individual login.

Step 2: Check Spam and junk folders, and other email filters

Check spam and junk folders, as well as any inbox filters. All Chartbeat emails are sent from @chartbeat.com addresses, so searching your All Mail folder for @chartbeat.com is a good starting point.

Step 3: Allow emails from Chartbeat

Ask your IT team or email service provider if your email system is flagging Chartbeat emails. They may want to check that emails from [email protected],[email protected],[email protected],and [email protected] being blocked.

All Chartbeat users are able to create their own personal API keys which are necessary for making successful calls to our various API endpoints.

Create an API Key

Step 1:Find the API Keys page in your account settings (hover over your profile icon in the top-right corner > Settings > API Keys).

Step 2: Click 'Create API Key' in the top right corner.

Step 3: Select the appropriate APIs and Domains this key will have access to. To grant this key access to all of our APIs and endpoints, check the'all'button under Select API. If your API key should work for any site that your user account has access to, select 'any site'. Once you've made your selections, click 'Add API Key'.

Step 4: You should now see the API Key appear under the 'Manage API Keys' list.

All done! To create more API keys, simply repeat this process.

Delete an API Key

Simply click 'Delete' next to the relevant key and confirm your selection.

Question:

What isthe significance of the "apple.news" referrer in Chartbeat, and how does Chartbeat track visitors referred to our site via the News widget in iOS' Today View ?

Answer:

Apple.newswill display as a referrer in your Real-time Dashboard (and throughout our historical tools) whenever a visitor clicks an embedded web-URL link from within the Apple News iOS app that opens a page to your mobile website. So, if an article in the Apple News app includes an embedded web URL to your site within its text, all users that tap this link will arrive to your mobile website in the Safari app and we will track them as apple.news referred.

The Apple News app, only available to iPhone users in particular geographic regions currently, is not the same as the News widget in iOS' Today View, which (conversely)is available to iPhone users around the world.

So how do we track visitors that select the featured article links in the News widget? Well, this widget works differently for iPhone users in different geolocations...

If you are in a region where the Apple News app is available, visitors that access your articles from the News widget will be sent directly to the Apple News app. If you have our Apple News Integration, your Apple News Chartbeat Dashboard will register this engagement with your content inside of the Apple News app.

If you are in a region where the Apple News app is not yet available, visitors that access articles from the News widget will be sent to your mobile website in the Safari app. Our tracking script is unable to identify the referrer for these direct-to-article web sessions, so these visitors will be tracked within our direct-social referrer category, "Email, apps, & IMs".

With the Advanced Queries API, your team can automatically pull in traffic data to your other data analysis tools like Google Sheets, Excel, or Tableau. In this article, we'll cover how to create a very basic integration between Google Sheets and the Advanced Queries API to automatically populate your Chartbeat query results into your Google Sheet file instead of downloading the query CSV from your email each day to view in Excel. This is useful if you want more open access to the results of a report, or wish to streamline the process of importing your daily query data into a central repository, perhaps from multiple unique recurring queries.

Part A: Setting up your recurring query

1. In the Advanced Queries builder tool, select a query type of Recurring, along with the frequency of how often you'd like the report delivered to you. The selected frequency will also determine the query time range (e.g. a weekly delivered report will show data for the previous week).

documentation.

2. Fill out the builder to meet your desired query and selectSave Query at the bottom of the page

3. On the left-hand navigational menu, clickSaved queries,then open theRecurringtab

4. On the right side of your query, open the 3-dot menu and click "Copy query ID". Make sure to paste this value somewhere accessible, as we'll need it for a later step.

Part B: Configuring the API call in your Google Sheet file

1. Navigate to Google Sheets and create a blank spreadsheet

2. In cell A1 (top-left), paste in the following URL and hit enter:

=IMPORTDATA("https://api.chartbeat.com/query/v2/recurring/fetch/?host={host}&apikey={apikey}&query_id={query_id}")

The /query/v2/recurring/fetch endpoint is where the results of a recurring query are generated.The IMPORTDATA() function in Google Sheets returns the data from an API call directly into your spreadsheet.

3. You'll likely see an "#N/A" error in your cell, so let's correct that by editing the values in the brackets from the URL above:

{host}- the domain name of the site you're querying. This should match the domain listed on the Saved queries page (recurring tab)

{apikey} - your Chartbeat API key, which you can generate and retrieve here.

{query_id} - the Query ID retrieved from the Saved queries page

4. Once you've made these edits, click enter and you should see your data populate!

Note: If you get an error message of "query scheduled, not yet run" simply wait up to 2 hours after your query has been created to repeat step 4 above.

To refresh the daily/weekly/monthly data from your recurring query, simply click into the cell with your =IMPORTDATA() function (in our example, cell A1) and click enter, or refresh the browser tab of your Google Sheet. To learn more about setting up your sheet to automatically update, consult the Google documentation on Google Apps Scripts Editor (to set up both an update script and a trigger).

For more information on the Advanced Queries API, please consult our API endpoint

As with most web analytics services, we will track any session to your website where your page has been requested with our tracking snippet included. Occasionally, a few of our partners have experienced bot attacks on their websites which can result in significant inflation of your site's concurrents in our Real-time Dashboard. To be clear, these attacks are in no way related to our service apart from the unavoidable consequence of our tracking code detecting these bot sessions on your site and registering them as active visitors.

Unfortunately, if your site is targeted by one of these bad actor bot networks, there's not much that our own team can do to prevent the traffic data from being counted in your Chartbeat tracking tools as these bot networks tend to target sites from unique devices and randomized IP addresses.

Should your own website fall victim, we suggest that your internal analytics team work alongside your security & web-ops team to isolate and investigate the bot pageviews in your historical data across analytics platforms (Chartbeat, Google, Adobe, etc), looking for trends in data points such as user agent, browser version, device type, and IP address. With this information, your web-ops team may be able to determine conclusively the source of the traffic and block these sessions from reaching your site going forward, or to prevent your analytics code snippets from being loaded when the bot devices access your page.

What does bot traffic look like in my Real-time dashboard?

There are a few common patterns that indicate bot traffic may be hitting your website:

A spike in Direct traffic to your landing pages with very low engaged time

Spikes in Social traffic ("Email, apps, and IMs") to your article pages, also with low engaged time

Traffic from geo-locations that you don't often see in your dashboard

High traffic to multiple irrelevant archival stories (not published recently) in your Top Pages list

Advanced Queries allows you to pull data up to the current day with a data processing latency of several hours. This means that there is a slight delay in the data available to pull on the current day; e.g. running a query at 11:00 am for the current day (query end date equal to today's date) will return data from earlier in the morning, but not up to 11:00 am. To see exactly how current the data is in your same-day query, include "Hour" and "Minute" groups to your report. This will display your data in a per-minute time-series. For this reason, we generally recommend setting your query end date to the previous calendar day at the latest instead of trying to query today-so-far data metrics from this tool.

Advanced Queries is a great tool for analysts to export summary reports of your historical traffic data, with great flexibility to segment and filter the metrics on any parameter you can think of. If you are simply interested in a summary report each day of the top 1000 or 10,000 pages by pageviews, unique visitors, and/or engagement, you can create this report in Advanced Queries with one row for each unique page URL of your site where engagement data was collected. Here's an example screenshot of how to set up a report like this in our Advanced Queries interface:

[email protected]

If instead, your team is looking to export and store complete records of all the engagement data we collected on your properties and visitors, including session-level attributes like the visitors' location, device type, and referring site for each view, Advanced Queries is not the right tool for this. Adding many additional dimensions or "Group" parameters to the query pictured above will result in errors due to file size or incorrect format of the data that you're seeking.

This use case is fulfilled by our Log-level Reporting Service an add-on service that provides a simple solution for accessing our complete session-level engagement data every minute, piped directly to your Amazon S3 bucket or Google Cloud Storage instance.Unlike our APIs, data does not need to be pulled to be accessed; instead, Chartbeat sets up, stores, and transfers this data to you.With Log-level, youll have a detailed history of visitor interactions with your content, one row per pageview, and can use this data for additional analysis by connecting it to your other internal business intelligence platforms.

To learn more about our Log-level Reporting Service, email your customer success manager, account manager, or .

Follow the steps below to add Chartbeat tracking to your site.

Note:You must be set up with a Chartbeat account to access our tools and view your site's engagement data. To get in touch with our sales team about a trial, email [email protected].

Chartbeat tracking for desktop and mobile web

The below script tags should be loaded in the global header of your site (before the closing <head> tag),afterthe rel="canonical" element is loaded in your HTML.

<script type='text/javascript'> (function() { /** CONFIGURATION START **/ var _sf_async_config = window._sf_async_config = (window._sf_async_config || {}); _sf_async_config.uid = #####; //CHANGE THIS _sf_async_config.domain = 'YourDomain.com'; //CHANGE THIS _sf_async_config.flickerControl = false; _sf_async_config.useCanonical = true; _sf_async_config.useCanonicalDomain = true; _sf_async_config.sections = ''; //CHANGE THIS TO YOUR SECTION NAME(s) _sf_async_config.authors = ''; //CHANGE THIS TO YOUR AUTHOR NAME(s) /** CONFIGURATION END **/ function loadChartbeat() { var e = document.createElement('script'); var n = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; e.type = 'text/javascript'; e.async = true; e.src = '//static.chartbeat.com/js/chartbeat.js'; n.parentNode.insertBefore(e, n); } loadChartbeat(); })();</script><script async src="//static.chartbeat.com/js/chartbeat_mab.js"></script>

The UID variable needs to be assigned to your unique Chartbeat account ID, available from your Account Executive or Customer Success Manager.

The domain variable should be assigned to your site name (usually the root domain). If implementing for more than one site, the domain variable in this code should also be updated to the root domain of each unique site.

We suggest reading our section & author implementation instructions for details on how to send a page's section and author metadata to our servers.

If your website makes use of dynamic page change, infinite scroll, or Single Page App architecture, you will need to implement our virtualPage function for Chartbeat to properly track these pageviews.

Additional Integrations

If your organization publishes content using Google's AMP frameworkor makes use of Facebook Instant Articles, your team will need to use our separate AMP or Facebook IA integrations to track visitors on those pages:

Google AMP integration

Facebook Instant Articles integration

Optional: If your site allows users to register for user accounts or become full subscribers, we suggest making use of our Subscriber Engagement tracking implementation, detailed here on our support site.

If you are transitioning all pages across your site from HTTP to HTTPS (or vice versa) simultaneously, no changes are required to maintain full functionality of your Chartbeat tracking. Our tracking code is able to handle both secure and non-secure protocols, and you should not see any interruption of your service due to a protocol change.

Our standard website snippet loads our tracking library as a protocol-relative URL, so it will work seamlessly after your migration:

https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag

For cases where only some page of your site will be transitioned to the new protocol either temporarily or as a permanent solution (for example, your homepage is switched to HTTPS prior to the rest of your site), there may be a change needed to maintain accurate tracking of your visitors in Chartbeat.

By default, no referrer data is sent for traffic that flows from HTTPS to non-secure HTTP pages, and our tracking script collects this data as visitors access each page of your site so we can identify how your users arrived to their current page (i.e. Traffic Sources in your Real-time & Historical dashboards).

In this case, to ensure that referrer data is passed when visitors move from secure to non-secure pages on your site, you should implement one of the following meta referrer tags in your site's HTML<head>:

<meta name="referrer" content="unsafe-url">

OR

<meta name="referrer" content="origin-when-crossorigin">

The meta referrer tag allows referrer data to be passed while preserving the benefits of encrypted, secure pages. For more information on meta referrertags, check out this blog post from Moz detailing HTTPS and its implications for referrer data:

Question:

Why is recirculation showing over 100% in Real-time for my page and/or site?

Answer:

Recirculation can reach over 100% for a given page if there are more concurrent visitors on subsequent article pages than the total number of concurrents still on the referring page.For example, if there are 5 concurrents on the original "Article A" page right now, and there are 10 concurrent visitors that moved from "Article A" to another article on the site, recirculation on"Article A" would be 200%.

To explain, recirculation is calculated from the total number of users currently on a subsequent article page divided by the total users currently on the origin article page. Typically the number of visitors that navigate to another page is smaller than the number of users who read an article and then exit the site, so seeing a recirculation value over 100% indicates that more visitors moved deeper into the site after reading an initial page.

The same answer also applies to over 100% recirculation site-wide in our Real-time dashboard. If there are more concurrents engaging with subsequent articles on your site than there are total concurrents engaging with their first article page of their site-session, we will display over 100% site-wide recirculation.

Question:

How long will it take for the Heads Up Display to show pin colors (position-relative performance indicators) for new or recently implemented landing pages on my site?

Answer:

Landing pages with recently installed Chartbeat code (or updated page paths) will require some time for positional performance to begin displaying on HUD pins. Depending on the standardization of your site's HTML templates, positional performance should start appearing for most of your story positions after 2-3 weekdays and (separately) 2-3 weekend days.

Additional background and technical details

After installing the Heads Up Display (HUD) on a landing page with recently-implemented Chartbeat code, you may see pins appear without the positional performance coloring. You'll know this is the case if all pins on your page are colored grey, instead of the range of green (overperforming), grey (average performance), and red (underperforming).

XPath

Our positional performance for each link is calculated using an exponential moving average. We measure the click-through rate of links based on their (a way of defining the positional hierarchy of elements on a site), and keep a rolling model that incorporates the entire history of performance at that position, with higher weight given to more recently acquired data.

We model positional performance in two ways: per hour, and weekday vs. weekend. We store average CPM (clicks per minute) data for each XPath on your landing page, each hour of the day, and model hourly CPM rates for these positions separately for weekdays and weekends to account for different traffic patterns for each part of the week. The HUD works to populate pin colors by comparing the current CPM of your story positions to previous CPM rates for the same positions during the same time of day and day of the week (weekday vs weekend). For example, a homepage editor viewing a red pin in the HUD at 10:00AM on a Monday knows that this story is underperforming compared to recent performance of articles in this same postion at 10:00AM on previous weekdays.

To populate positional performance data, the HUD has to see the relevant XPath two or more times within the respective hour and weekday/weekend grouping. Some sites can regularly rotate through a variety of HTML templates that will alter the XPath, so this can take from a few days to over a week of data collection. For weekends, you will not see any positional performance until at least the second weekend, as the HUD will require three days' worth of weekend data (Saturday, Sunday, and the following Saturday).

Example:If you integrate Chartbeat code on Monday morning at 10:00am, you should see positional performance by Wednesday or Thursday at 10:00am. You will not see positional performance coloring on weekend days until at least the second Saturday (12 days after the Monday integration).

How does article search work

Chartbeat Historical gives you a deeper, longer-term perspective on the content metrics and audience data you monitor in real-time, so you can evaluate and analyze how your content performance paces toward editorial goals. It visualizes and surfaces this data more quickly than any other analytics platform.

Learn more below about ways to use the Historical Dashboards flexible custom analysis, easy-to-read insights, and key metrics set to make smarter strategic decisions and build a loyal, engaged audience.

Main Metrics

Date Selection

Traffic Visualization

Top Stories

Story View

Multi-Site View

Article Search

Main Metrics

The Historical Dashboards core metrics are featured right at the top:total engaged minutes,pageviews, andaverage engaged minutes. We wanted to combine our signature quality metrics with more traditional ones to give users the necessary context behind pageviews and clicks.

Engaged Minutesdisplays thetotal number of engaged minutes that all visitors spent actively interacting with the given site, section, or author's content for the previous day.

Pageviews,defined as the total number of pages viewed for the given site, section, or author.

Avg. Engaged Timedisplays the average time in seconds visitors are spending actively interacting with your content: including scrolls, clicks, mouse movements, touch events, and keystrokes. We track reader activity every second and report engagement stats back to our servers every 15 seconds, through the Chartbeat JS that is deployed when our code loads. Historical Avg Engaged Time is equal to Total Engaged Minutes divided by Pageviews.

For a deeper layer of context, each metric is automatically compared to how it was performing over a similar timeframe the week before. That way youre always keeping up to date with how your content is performing day over day and week over week.

Date Selection

By default, the Historical Dashboard loads with the data since midnight yesterday, but using the date picker gives you complete flexibility over what range of historical data you want to look over. You can use the preset options to set the yesterday, last week, or last month, or set an entirely custom date range.

Just open the calendar box and select the date you want to start from, then just move your cursor to end date -- youll see the days in between turn light blue as you hover over them so you knowthey'rebeing included.

Traffic Visualization

The center of Dashboard automatically visualizes your sites performance by either engaged minutes or pageviews, segmented by either traffic sources, device type, or loyalty. The bar graph automatically updates to your selected date range, and if youre viewing a date range that includes multiple days, selecting an individual days bar jumps you to just that day in one click.

Select a Traffic Source, Device type, or Visitor Frequency option to filter the entire Dashboard and get summary metrics and top stories specific to that group. Note that while you may select both a section or author filter and a referrer filter at the same time, you cannot select more than one kind of referrer filter at the same time. For example, you could view Loyal traffic for the News section, but you could not see the mobile visitors who came via a social network.

Depending on what team you work on and what performance indicators matter to your goals, you can quickly change how youre looking at the data to understand how well your content has been reaching your audience.

Maybe that means honing in on which days of the week typically see peak social engagement on mobile devices, or which hour of the day sees your most loyal audience read your content. A good place to start is to toggle back and forth between engaged time and pageviews to familiarize yourself with how those trends might differ -- you might be surprised to see a high quantity of pageviews that had low engagement, or find relatively few pageviews racking up a ton of engagement.

Top Stories

Below the visualization graph youll see the top 20 pieces of content, ranked by default by the total engaged minutes readers spent with that article over your defined date range. But your can easily re-rank the list by either pageviews or average engaged minutes so you can see what articles are grabbing attention, and which ones are keeping it.

Successes and missed opportunities are automatically flagged with badges that give you a smarter, deeper perspective on how a given article performed to better inform longer-term strategies and decisions.

The author of each article is shown right beneath the title, and you can use the author filter (at the top of the Dashboard next to the date picker) to pull an author-specific view of your sites data and top content. See just the pageviews and engagement metrics achieved by stories written by a specific author.

Once you've found a view top stories sorted with the pivots and filters you want to share, select the export button to download a CSV of those 20 stories to share with your team or incorporate into your other projects.

Story View

Click on any story to go deeper and see an article-specific view of the Historical Dashboard. For any date range since the day that article was published, you can get the same level of metric and filter flexibility so you can really gauge the lifetime value of each and every one of your articles.

If the story is getting traffic in the moment, you get a quick view of how many people are actively reading it in real-time. Select the button to open the same story in the Real-Time Dashboard to see how you can capitalize on the readership.

Multi-Site View

Multi-Site View is a roll-up view of different sites belonging to your account. Its a mode that allows you to pull multiple sites into the Real-Time Dashboard, Historical Dashboard, the Big Board, and the Chartbeat mobile app. The Multi-Site View contains a lot of the granular functionality of Chartbeats Dashboards, so you'll be able to analyze your groups data in surgical detail from pivoting from traffic sources, devices and geography of your readership to filtering by Sections or Authors belonging to all your sites.

You can now compare historical performance of stories, sections, and authors across your network and visualize your networks performance by either engaged minutes or pageviews, segmented by either traffic sources, device type, or loyalty.

Note: For Site Groups over 100, the historical dashboard currently only supports 30 days of data in the date picker. The historical dashboard currently does not support badges.

Article Search

Article search functionality is available within the Real-Time and Historical Dashboards. It allows users to quickly search and easily locate specific articles by title or keywords associated with article headlines within Chartbeat.

When you search using keywords associated with your article titles, you will get a maximum of 10 results, these being articles that that include your keywords in the title.If youre searching for a story from a sites Historical dashboard, we will surface articles that were published within the last 4 months and received traffic within the last 30 days, including articles that were published that day and are only viewable in the Real-Time dashboard currently.

Learn more about the article search feature in our article.

Article Search is currently supported in our Real-Time and Historical dashboards for single and multi-site views, but not in the Chartbeat mobile app.

Only organization owners and admin users can invite people to join their organization.

Send an invitation

Hover over your avatar in the top right corner. [email protected]

Click Settings in the menu.

Select Users in the Admin menu on the left, then click the Invite User button.

Choose a role for the user youd like to invite (learn more about roles and permissions ).

Enter their email address and click Invite.

If you are inviting someone as a member you have the option to get them set up with some basic permissions. Under Site permissions, just select which sites your teammate should have access to.

Click Invite.

The person you invited will receive an activation email from us. Be sure to remind them to check their spam filter in case they cannot find their invite.

Note:A person cannot have multiple Chartbeat accounts linked to their email address. If the person youre trying to invite already has a Chartbeat account with another organization, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or to transfer their existing account to your organization.

What it is: Chartbeat Rising is a hack project built by Chartbeat data scientists and design engineers. We were curious to see the rising (and falling) topics across the internet in real time, and figured you might be too. Whether you check it once a day or keep it on a big monitor for the whole team to watch, you can instantly see what's going on around the web- and whether anything's relevant to you.

How to get it:After logging into Chartbeat, head to chartbeat.com/labs and click on the "Try it" button below the "Rising" box. Couldn't be easier.

How it works:We anonymize and aggregate content across thousands of sites across the Chartbeat Universe in over 30 countries (six continents, if youre counting) and show them to you here grouped by topic and site category.See what's trending across entertainment, technology, and news. You can even customize it to rank topics by concurrents or engagement so you can not only see what's popular but what's grabbing and holding peoples' attention across the web.

The Chartbeat app for Android makes it easy to monitor your site's traffic and trending pages anywhere you go. Whether youre at your desk, in the field, or otherwise on the move, download the mobile app to understand engagement with your content as its read and consumed across the web.

See your sites top-performing stories and share them with your colleagues

View key site and visitor metrics, including engaged time, recirculation, and social referral percent

Dig into a particular section, author, traffic source, or referrer using flexible filters

Benchmark site performance and traffic patterns with week-over-week comparison graphs

Step 1: Download the Chartbeat app

Find Chartbeat in the Google Play store.

Tap Install.

Tap the Chartbeat icon to launch the app.

Step 2: Sign in

Once you've installed the Chartbeat app, sign in to your user account to get started with Chartbeat traffic monitoring on the go!