The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks, John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat.
Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. It also shows average load times, what percentage of current visitors are returning, how many are reading, how many are actively writing in comments or engaging with the site in some other way, and how many are simply idle. Webmasters can set up alerts for traffic peaks and site slowdowns. All it requires is one line of Javascript to be inserted on a site and then it pings Chartbeat every 10 seconds.
The dashboard also offers a historical view, and even lets you play the dashboard through time like a movie so that you can see for instance what was going on during a particular peak—where was traffic coming from and what were visitors looking at. If you choose, you can also share your dashboard and make it public. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has done so for his blog A VC. Click through to his blog, and then you can see the results on his Chartbeat here. The video below also shows what it looks like.
Chartbeat is offering a free 30-day trial and then wants to charge $10 a month for the service. Competing real-time Web analytics services include Get Clicky and Woopra (which we covered here).
Although Google analytics defaults to yesterday as the final day, you can actually set it to the current day, so you can get real-time analytics, too.
Good point, Sam. I fixed the post. It is still a different experience. With Chartbeat you literally sit there and watch what is happening on your site without refreshing.
Also not true as Google Analytics update every two hours on the hour!
http://Spideroak.com
Or if you had an ounce of sense you could just install bbclone for free.
Trying to do this now… where in settings do I do this?
With Google Analytics you can see SOME of today’s stats, but they’re not real time and they’re not complete (eg. average pageviews per user may be off until the final results are done, most likely the next day).
I’d second that comment about Google Analytics — they’re often several hours behind the times. Not good for discovering if you’re getting a surge of traffic or having an issue causing users to bounce more than normal. I pay good money for Clicky (they get pissed if you call them “Get Clicky”) for that reason.
I can’t wait to try Chartbeat now. I love Betaworks’ Bit.ly for its realtime analytics, and they’re good folks over there.
Sam, that’s true, but GA is NOT real time. At best it’s 2 to 4 hours behind, which is not acceptable if you actually want real time data.
This looks like it could get some real traction.
What a fantastic service. I had a look at the live traffic reports from Fred Wilson’s blog and the service and real-time reporting looks amazing.
Its a combination of a live traffic report and I can also see that it has a section for historical data as well
I don’t know how this will work on high traffic sites and how much load and traffic jam it will cause since it pings it every 10 seconds but nonetheless its a really good service.
This definitely beats the likes of Alexa, Compete, SiteMeter etc.
Well done ChartBeat
this betaworks company is totally on a hot streak
This is definately a fine looking product, one that I’m now going to see how I could integrate into my site. How does it know who is contributing to the site though?
How does this compare with KISSmetrics? Can it keep tracks of twitter stats, say for example, tweets going in and out of http://www.tweetizen.com ?
I say providing real-time web analytics is a fad, a gimmick that has no genuine business appeal.
It is cool though!
You are such a wet blanket. Isn’t it past your bedtime over there in Belgium?
UK!
Belgians never sleep!
I know!
So you guys look up the IP of the commentator and then can get a location?
I agree to a point with the business use of it. BUT it might really be useful from a ‘future tail’ standpoint where you can watch a campaign take speed and prepare!
I would agree to that. You do not need real time analytics for business decision. Talk to any analytics expert and they would tell you the same thing – analysis needs to be based on trends and you are not going to sit and watch realtime to know when there is a spike. There are services for that.
Its a cool looking site but no real business value here. Avinash Kaushik of Web Analytics an hour a day even mentions this in his book – you do not need real time analytics.
Have you ever run an online game? Running averages of things like peak concurrent, average concurrent, and low concurrent users is a very valuable thing. And if the site is suddenly slowing down, having an immediate dashboard showing where users are congregating that is causing the slowdown is helpful.
Does it help me make many long term business decisions? No. But it is not helpful.
what is important is the ability to see who is reading vs who is writing for me that’s pretty important to me. Will I make business decisions on it in real time.. no but over the course of a month of data i might.
Real-time analytics does offer something in terms of knowing where your traffic surge is coming from – OR – letting you know when there’s a problem with your site.
Also, with software like Woopra where you can see an individual visitor’s navigation path, you can begin to learn how your users are using your site and learn about issues with the workflow of your site.
Although Google Analytics offers navigations paths as well, there is a different kind of data you can pull from seeing an individual user use your site in real-time. It’s almost like watching a Silverback (another great piece of usability software) demo.
This product looks cool, although I don’t know if I’m ready to pay $10/mo for something like this when whos.amung.us and Woopra do it for free (although they both have their shortcomings too)
I’m the same opinion as Robin Wauters – real time analytics is a gimmick – but a lot of people like that and most likely would pay for it.
I guess it’s best used on a site shortly after launch. The user behavior can be watched closer.
My question is: can it scale properly? Can it cope with high traffic sites? Lets say 180 million page-views / month?
TC forget about who.amung.us? The real-time stats company that started in their forums?
Two years later we serve 350 million widgets daily and provide wonderful real-time stats to over 600k websites that use our free service.
whos.amung.us btw.
yes oops, typo, i meant: whos.amung.us
This looks like it was beautifully done. The charts put Google Analytics to shame. The big question, though, is whether sites are willing to pay $10/mo for Chartbeat vs. free for Analytics. Not sure the snazziness and extra functionality would be enough to get me to switch.
For instant stats, I constantly visit statcounter.com but this seems prettier. Might test it out…
If you had had to choose with a stat provider that showed you a snapshot of what your site is doing right now or one that didn’t… and all things being equal, I think most people would choose for the one that was realtime.
I just got my Beta invite to Woopra and am trying to do some side by side with these here but that whos.amung.us has some cool stuff and its free. Clicky seemed to work as well. There are some discrepencies among the numbers between these and I guess I would need more time to compare. I would try chartbeat but it needs some sort of free trial without having to give out a CC # to try it.
sounds like a useful idea for a change
Signing up for this now, this is great stuff. Beats cpanel and Analytics.
Just installed this on my blog in 2 minutes, very cool!
GetClicky is absolutely amazing, and it’s real-time tracking make it far better than Google Analytics.
Awesome. Real time stats would be great and $10 a month is not that bad. I also did not know you could adjust the google analytic’s settings so it updates faster then once a day.
Real time is a ‘gimmick’? The majority of web operations have adapted their businesses around ‘next day’ stats, and true, not *everyone* has a need for real time info. I believe, though, that as real-time info because more common place, we’ll see services and businesses spring up around the availability of that real-time info.
Happy to learn how watching stats roll in all day help your online business. The real advantage of web analytics is spotting trends over periods of time which you can adjust to, there’s absolutely no business case for real-time stats. None.
Read my comment above, Robin
not true, check out http://www.tval...s.com/home.html live tv streaming onto the web. Visits and trends are fed back to the show and it responds to that dynamically.
We just installed this – it was cool for an hour, until a memory leak caused it to bring down our website.
Stay away.
I just spent some time checking this out. It is pretty cool, though I don’t think I’ll be spending $10 a month for this.
Thank you for letting me know that I can check today’s activity from Google Analytics. I didn’t know.
Looks interesting with the alerts which could be useful. At the same time, I cringe every time someone wants me to add another javscript file. They start to add up and impact performance.
Interesting and very nice visuals. But this is really just a feature that can be added by so many others, including google, and will probably always be free somewhere. @robblewis
We have had this with Hitslink for over 4 years.
cool product – i just signed up and installed. within 5 minutes of reading this i was watching visitor activity on my site. nice. signing through paypal was a bit of pain.. oh well..
while this will not replace enterprise class analytics, software, this is def. a great way to augment it.
amazing tool
agreed that for most businesses analytics should not be based on micro short-term trends, but there is definitely a use case for this if you have a media-based site with topical/trend oriented traffic, you can optimize your homepage content quickly and on the fly via a resource like this and shove more Octomom, etc news into the maw of a willing and rabid public
what is the technology behind this? how does this work?