Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Chartbeat and Visual Revenue: Analytics Reporting Apps that Can Help Grow Your Small Business or Publication

By Liz Jenei

Big businesses and publications have entire backend analytics departments to help decipher real-time data. Now there’s an app for that. In this blog post we will discuss two analytic services that can help your small business grow by getting to know your readers and consumers better, what sections of your website are most appealing and what areas of your website need to be updated.

Chartbeat
Chartbeat is a company that provides real-time analytics to websites and blogs that don’t have the bandwidth or know-how to capture backend analytics specs. These real-time statistics include: load-times, how many pixels the page reader has scrolled, where users are logged in from and if the reader is actively reading the website page, idle or even typing on their keyboard. This type of information, gathered from the second the viewer is on your website, can show which areas of your website are engaging and which need work.

For example: if you have a website that has a contact form and you are noticing in the analytics that users are idling on that page for a long time before they start typing, you can deduce that perhaps you need to re-word the directions. If you see them typing immediately, then idling five minutes on the page when they scroll to submit, perhaps the Captcha is too difficult to decipher.  Through Chartbeat, finding out these problems in real-time can help you to solve problems much sooner than looking back through weekly or monthly analytics reports.

Stats given by the second can help you maximize engagement and bring potential clients to your website. Now, you not only have the ability to address site issues immediately, but you can also start to understand your page viewers more concisely. Are people in the Midwest going to your webpage more often before work? Are people on the East Coast most likely to fill out contact forms in the evening? Chartbeat can help decipher that information for you and connect you to your users on a more personal level.

Visual Revenue
When you have a website that is publishing upwards of 20+ articles a day, sometimes getting the content that will get the most reads in the right spot on the homepage is the hardest decision you may have as an editor-- Visual Revenue helps take out that guess work.

Visual Revenue is geared towards online publications. Instead of giving analytics statistics in number form, Visual Revenue gives real-time suggestions on which stories should be placed on your publication’s homepage and for how long. These suggestions are based on predictive technology and your publications’s lead editorial direction and vision.

When you have a new story or content to upload to your homepage, the Visual Revenue app makes a suggestion on where that article will get the most readership, based on predictive real-time data and your company settings. Once the suggestion is made, the editor can make a final decision for the placement and longevity of that article before making it live.

Sometimes the backend involved with your small business website or online publication can feel like you’re running a Fortune 500. As technology advances, however, some tasks (especially website analytics) can be delegated almost completely to apps. Chartbeat and Visual Revenue are two of these useful tools that companies such as USA Today, Forbes and Starbucks are taking advantage of to help maximize their website potential. The good news is, now even your small business can take advantage of these stats. 

2 comments:

Terry said...

Really interesting post. Great blog. I am looking forward to reading more.

Unknown said...

Thank you Terry!