Chartbeat’s New Heads Up Display Shows Stats Right On A Publisher’s Website

Following a big redesign of Chartbeat’s real-time analytics service, CEO Tony Haile says the company has returned its attention to providing features that are specifically useful for online publishers. And it’s launching a big one today.

With the new Heads Up Display, Chartbeat is making its data directly visible on websites — as Haile puts it, publishers no longer have to “try and translate” the data from their Chartbeat dashboard to figure out how it applies to their site.

After you install the Heads Up Display, a tiny gray box will appear at the bottom of the screen whenever you visit your website. Click on the box and it expands into a bar showing some of the basic Chartbeat data for that specific page — like the number of current visitors, the top traffic sources, and the most clicked-on links.

The data isn’t just limited to that one bar. When you view the Heads Up Display on your homepage, every article gets a label showing where it currently ranks among stories on the site (based on clicks-per-minute). So if your number one story is buried way down on the page, well, you may want to adjust the layout. And there’s another, smaller bar that shows “X percent of people read until here.” In essence, Haile says Chartbeat is helping publishers locate the “fold” (a newspaper term) on their web page — the point where most people stop reading.

“It changes with every single page,” he says, but you need to know where it is so that you don’t bury important links below the fold.

Chartbeat has already been testing the Heads Up Display with a few publishers, and Haile says those publishers treat it as the main way they use the service — they don’t visit the Chartbeat site itself unless they need to take a deeper dive. The Heads Up Display is going live for all Chartbeat Publishing (formerly known as Newsbeat) customers today.