Chartbeat: If You Just Wanna Feel Smart
Yow– there’s cool tech and then there’s hyper-seductive user experience, like what you’ll find in the site traffic analysis package Chartbeat. I signed up for the free trial– that was a minute and a half I’ll never get back–and got sucked right into the vortex. Find your sunglasses then hit the link to see the demo dashboard in action.
Cool huh? I know I should be more professional, but my first thought was “How can I turn this into a drinking game?!”
The real time functionality, refreshed every 10 seconds, includes:
*What pages of your site your readers are on, how many are on each page, and a heat map showing what part of the page they are on.
*The number of people reading/writing/idle. I got all excited when someone started writing (another comment!), then I realized it was/is me as I write up this post…
*The number of visitors you have right now, new vs returning.
*A geolocation panel– that’s a map, showing your visitors’ locations.
*A length-of-visit chart.
*Referrer details.
Recent inlinks and tweets.
It reminded me of the Mint stats package, but the Chartbeat graphics are much more prominent and engaging, perfect for folks like me who grew up looking at the pictures.
yeah chartbeat is rad! most definitely worth $10/mo, especially as you can add multiple sites. the page-load time and alerts (page-load time too high, site not responsive) are great for catching problems early.
Yeah Dylan- I totally forgot to bring up the alert feature, but I got one in my email today when I hit a ‘new high for the month’ (one day in, but still). Very cool way to know immediately about a server problem, etc. I have to say I’m very impressed, and $10/mo. is just about painless. Thanks for the comment Dylan- c’mon back! –T