Chartbeat
Largest users
Chartbeat analytics is a real-time performance analytics tool. Control the story, track a product launch, or exploit an opportunity as it happens. The dashboard, iPhone app, and email SMS alerts let you know the minute your traffic spikes, your servers crash, or your page slows to a crawl. The Chartbeat measurement technology shows you whether people are actively engaging with your content, not just how many page views they received.Chartbeat offers Real-time data with the following advantages:Traditional analytics services are focused on understanding usual behaviour across persistent content. For example, how well a sign up flow converts a visitor into a user. In contrast, real-time analytics is focused on unusual behaviour, the peaks and troughs of the social web, and it is focused upon transient content: content that might not have existed yesterday, might not be looked at tomorrow but today is driving your site.
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Reviews for Chartbeat
Overview
Chartbeat is a real-time analytics tool. Their pitch is "The web doesn't wait - neither should you". The idea is that most analytics software is about analyzing historical data but the web is becoming so real-time that you need to catch trends as they happen rather than the next day. It's an interesting concept, but it also feels sort of like a solution without a problem.
Strong Points:
First of all, it is pleasant. There are neat gadgets. The whole thing is heavily animated and the designers clearly went wild designing this. None of this really impacts how the software works (it actually kind of gets in the way) but you definitely get a good first impression.
One of the best features in Chartbeat is that it tells you how long each page takes to load. Most analytics software runs as code at the bottom of each of your web pages, but Chartbeat has a little bit of code at the top of the page which basically acts as a timer to see how long the page takes to load. This is really awesome information to have and most analytics software lack to show that.
Also, information on Chartbeat is presented in a way that should appeal to websites without much traffic (i.e. small business sites). You can see the activity of each visitor on your site individually which is really useful during times when you're not getting a ton of traffic.
Weak Points:
Without a doubt, the worst part of my experience with Chartbeat was that I got locked out of my account right after I signed up. I sent in a bug report and didn't hear anything back until the next day. When I did hear back, they had fixed the problem but there was nothing resembling an apology in their response.
There were also a number of bugs with the software itself. Most notably, they have a "rewind' feature which didn't work most of the time. It's common now for companies to slap a "Beta" tag onto software as an excuse when it doesn't work, but Chartbeat costs money. No software is truly bug-free, but if major functionality is broken, they shouldn't charge people for it.
Finally, this concern is probably most relevant to you: the software just doesn't seem that useful. I like the concept of "real-time" analytics, but that doesn't mean that you can ignore everything that happened in the past. Once you get past the slick design and interesting statistics, you realize that there's not a whole lot you can actually do with the information. This simply isn't a full-blown analytics tool. It sounds too harsh, but Chartbeat is really just a cool toy.
Conclusion
Chartbeat takes an interesting angle on analytics and it might turn into something really useful as the web continues to evolve. For now, I think it's just a novelty. The pricing is low enough that it might actually be worth it for people that are really into real-time traffic info, but you need to consider another alternatives. Chartbeat isn't capable of being your main analytics tool.
