Chartbeat vs. SiteSpect

It is well suited to keeping me toward a specified goal, and gives me concrete numbers and gives me an idea of what we need to do to meet our goals. It's less appropriate if you want something more than pageviews, and doesn't really do a lot for video views.

Incentivized

SiteSpect is kind of the difference between the space shuttle and a bicycle. They will both get you places. However Sitespect is considerably more complex and more configurable than most other options that I have seen and used (Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, etc.). But those other solutions also have a much lower learning curve and [users] are able to do a lot of things with relatively no coding experience or skill, where SiteSpect really does need capable developers to be utilized well.

Incentivized

• Provides easy at-a-glance look at what people are reading right now
• Heads-up Display allows you to make sure the homepage is showing the content people want to read
• Headline testing tool provides fascinating insight into what makes people read a story and improves headline-writing ability

• You can quickly run test campaigns of content and promotions – without burdening valuable IT resources, and without the need for JavaScript tags, code changes, or JavaScript that slow your ability to test, and decrease your site’s speed.

• Source of traffic needs improvement. Search and social make sense, but "internal" and "links" is a grey area. It would be helpful to define those with an organization and provide an information icon so users can easily remember what each of those buckets is tracking.
• More ways to customize the real-time board. For example, with video content, that's great that I can see a user has started a video, but what is the completion rate, was that only on O&O or can that track Facebook, too?
• Would like to see demo (age) information included as a way to slice the data so I can see what's working with my older and younger demo.

Incentivized

• One current limitation of Sitespect is that the data it captures is numeric. For example, it will not capture a department name variable such as supplements. The workaround is that a user can create a supplement department value capture that fires as 0 or 1. For companies with very large numbers of departments the workaround can be a time consuming process.

I gave Chartbeat a 5 for a renewal rating, because, while it delivers clear and understandable content, Google Analytics also provides many of the same features for free. For a small to medium website, I believe it would be more cost effective to use Google Analytics. A website with a high amount of traffic, however, could merit spending the money on Chartbeat to maximize their potential.

I'm no longer at the company where I used SiteSpect, but based on my 18+ months as the manager responsible for the use of SiteSpect, I'd definitely recommend continuing with the product. I've since recommended it to one other company. SiteSpect has been a great business partner - the level of customer support that I got was outstanding over the time that I used the product.

Chartbeat is really pretty straightforward. The only things that may cause confusion are the string of sidebar features and tools at the left of the screen. I mostly use the big leader board in real-time and the historical feature (looking at the monthly or weekly performance of my team's content) and then generate reports automatically from there.

Incentivized

I have had limited experience of support for Chartbeat but whenever I have needed help it has been there. Recently there was an issue of seeing different forms of data in real time - app and otherwise effectively, and the issue was being clearly dealt with and communicated back to us.

Incentivized

When we have any questions on how the tool can be utilized for some unique requirements, they always make excellent suggestions.

Just need to have your requirements ready such as, what you are expecting from the tool, is there anything specific you want regarding reporting, tracking etc.

Google Analytics has gradually become much more difficult to use, and much slower in its realtime reporting. It was the changes that came in with Google Analytics 4 that gave us the final push to work with Chartbeat - a product some of us were already familiar with from previous jobs. Things are just much harder to find in GA, and when time is always tight you can't afford to spend a long time looking for particular data - it should be quick and easy to locate

Incentivized

We haven't seen any platform deliver the flicker-free performance of SiteSpect. While most platforms have improved their business user facing tools since we originally selected SiteSpect, we've never had any doubt about it's advanced capabilities. Any test we can imagine can be run through SiteSpect, and they have provided the support we required when we didn't have the expertise in-house to realize our vision. At this stage, I feel that SiteSpect's user interface lags behind the competition, but it's feature set can't be argued with.

Incentivized

• It has helped us save time in report generation and performance analysis.
• By helping us evaluate our contributors, we're able to get our money's worth.
• Seeing our numbers on the Big Board fosters healthy competition among brands, motivating us to distribute our stories better.

Incentivized

• Our clients see large revenue increases
• Insight and better customer service
• Budgetary spending analysis. E.g Do we really need lifestyle photography? etc.