Chartbeat Versus Google Analytics, is there a comparison?

Chartbeat Versus Google Analytics, is there a comparison?

There is a highly competitive world in web analytics, a dizzying array of free software, subscription-based software and one-time purchase software for a website manager to sift through hoping to find some type of clarity on who is visiting their website. The best known of these tools is the monolith - Google Analytics (GA). This is really a fantastic tool, but there are other types of software out there that offer a greater level of specificity that GA is not able to offer. In comes Chartbeat.

Before, we get into the differences between the two, let’s first define the offerings of Google Analytics and Chartbeat.

Google Analytics

 How does it work?

Google offers lines of Javascript (a.k.a. tracking code) to the webmaster/marketer to place into the website that sends data back to Google about visitors and visits. The huge data center at Google then takes the information and sends it back out to the webmaster/marketer in the forms of graphs, numbers and charts - hopefully in an easily understandable format. (Farney & McHale, 2013a)

The information sent back are displayed through a variety of reports, here is an overview of those reports:

Report Types 

Real Time	Audience	Acquisition	Behavior	Conversion
Definition: Data on the people who are using the Website at that moment.	Definition: A report that gives you an overview on your visitors to the site	Definition: The origins of the traffic to the site, how is it getting there?	Definition: How people navigate your site or how they interact on the site.	Definition: User defined successes, reports are empty until a goal is created.
Types of Reports:	Types of Reports:	Types of Reports:	Types of Reports:	Types of Reports:
Overview	Overview	Overview	Overview	Goals
Locations	Cohort Analysis	All Traffic	Behavior	Ecommerce
Traffic Sources	Demographic	Ad Words	Site Content	Multi-Channel Funnels
Content	Interest	Search Engine Optimization	Site Speed	Attribution
Events	Geo	Social	Site Search
Conversations	Behavior	Campaigns	Events
	Technology		Ad Sense
	Mobile		Experiments
	Custom		In-Page Analytics
	Benchmarking
	User Flow

(Farney & McHale, 2013b)

(Reed School of Media, 2015)

(Weiss, 2013)

As it is shown, Google Analytics is a robust tool that has created a number of filters, customization tools and goal settings to create reports that produces solutions for the eager marketer. The abilities of these reports are far reaching and should be investigated further if looking for specific information. However there are a few drawbacks to this tool that makes the reporting inaccurate and does not grab the whole picture.

·        The data that is generated is owned by Google, not great for those who are concerned with privacy

·        Data is only 25 months old, after that it is deleted from the reports

·        If you are an international company dealing with variable currencies, check to make sure GA supports those currencies

·        If you have multiple profiles you cannot cross compare

·        Only 25 goals per profile

(Patel, 2013)

Chartbeat

Who is Chartbeat?

Chartbeat is an analytics software that is a perfect marriage for content marketers. For those who own blogs or other editorial webpages this is a great tool for understanding how viewers are interacting with the content. It offers synchronous web traffic data combined with audience behavior data to show a holistic report on what elements are the most engaging on the website. It also shows what links are most popular in real-time so that you can quickly create content that is trending right now.

Report Types

        There are four report types within Chartbeat: Overview, Content, Social, Traffic Sources and Geo. However, rather than going through each of these reports as shown with Google Analytics, instead I intended to show the reports that differentiate Chartbeat with GA and give an overview of their functionality. 

Audience	Video
Definition: Overview of visitors	Definition: This report gives analysis on videos on the website.
Types of Reports:	Types of Reports:
Recirculation: How many if your returning or unique visitors read more than one article during one session	Play Rates: How many times a video is being played
Engaged time: This report shows what visitors are doing on a page, are they reading, commenting or being idle? How far did the person scroll down, were they moving their cursor around?	Lengths of Views: Are the users watching all the way through? Where do they stop?
Visitor frequency: How many times does a visitor come back.	Comparison: How does one video stand up to the other videos on the website

(Angeles, 2014)

(Dockterman, 2014)

How else does Chartbeat differ from GA?

First, Chartbeat is not as robust as GA nor does it have the wealth of customer feedback data that GA has, and the company knows this, so instead it has opted for a more niche market. This software is for those who want real-time specificity, are utilizing a multitude of media tactics and need quick and holistic data for those "game-time decisions".

One of the biggest differences between GA and Chartbeat is that they focus much more on engaged time: measureable time that the user is reading or engaging with the content. Chartbeat is able to do this by pinging the website every second versus utilizing timestamps, which GA does.  Chartbeat can measure which window is the active window (not just timestamping a window even though it is a hidden window in a long series of tabs), which pixels are in plain view (above the fold or below the fold) and how the reader has been interacting with the website by what they have clicked, how many times they have scrolled or how far they have scrolled within the past five seconds. This data can give an accurate real-time view of how users are engaging with the content, which will hopefully lead to maximizing attention. (Tornoe, 2014).

Secondly, Chartbeat has personalized dashboards for the various individuals managing the website. This is great for a website that has multiple bloggers working on a site who want to see the reports on their particular blog. If this blog has video and other customized reports it really helps this blogger to be able to change their layout around so it suits their needs.

This is a really fantastic analytics tool as well and can really give in-depth analysis for the right type of website. However, with any software there are drawbacks:

·         Not a free software, costs around $10/month

• Niche market without the same diversity of offerings (e.x. if the website does not have social media links or videos - not the analytics tool for you)

(Angeles, 2014)

Conclusion

For the average marketer, Google Analytics provides more than enough data and analysis to help the marketer make intelligent and market savvy decisions on how to improve their website. However, if you work in an industry that needs real-time data and is content driven, GA will not be enough for you. For bloggers, journalists, and social media gurus, Chartbeat is the tool. It can give the content engagement analysis in real-time, which will help create trending content.

References:

Angeles, S. (2014). 3 Google Analytics Alternatives (and Why You Should Use Them). Business News Daily. Retrieved on February 16, 2015 from: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6090-google-analytics-alternatives.html

Dockterman, E. (2014). People Aren't Actually Reading the Stories They Tweet. Time.Com, 1.

Farney, T., & McHale, N. (2013a). Implementing Google Analytics on Different Platforms. Library Technology Reports, 49(4), 9-15.

Farney, T., & McHale, N. (2013b). Goal Setting. Library Technology Reports, 49(4), 32-38.

Patel, M. (2013). Google Analytics limits and (possible) disadvantages. MatraXis. Retrieved on February 16, 2015 from: http://www.matraxis.co.uk/blog/google-analytics-limits-and-possible-disadvantages/#sthash.6zjTuFgl.dpuf

Reed School of Media. (2015). Lesson 5: Google Analytics. Retrieved Feb 16, 2015 from www.ecampus.wvu.edu

Tornoe, R. (2014). Aiming for 'Engaged Time'. Editor & Publisher, 147(8), 26-27.

Weiss, T. R. (2013). Google Launches Real-Time API Beta for Deeper Marketing Data. Eweek, 1.