Chartbeat vs. Contentsquare

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

It is well suited to businesses with a full time web analyst that will be using the tools to create actionable reports that drive action in the company. It is less appropriate where companies are just looking for some new tools and it will be forgotten soon after implementation. If a website is critical to your business and you have dedicated resources or consultants to help you understand the data, then it is invaluable. I love it.

• 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

• The qualitative aspects of user experience are very well captured by ClickTale. We can get solid actionable insights through the various dashboards which track mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, etc.
• The visual conversion funnels give a very good high level view of landing page performance and how they work together.
• The video recordings are especially helpful. The user behavior captured is especially helpful in making decisions about user interface - form fields, call to actions, etc.

• 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

• Looking at isolated recordings without creating a segment, we still have to use the old interface
• User interface has been massively improved but there are a few nags here and there that still need to be addressed
• Mobile and desktop should be shown side by side and not separately

Incentivized

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.

For small companies with limited user testing budgets, ClickTale serves as a useful user testing tool. When I cannot get the funds for in depth user testing, I always know that I have a baseline of information I can rely on

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 had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

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

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

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is going deeper on UX understanding than traditional web analytics tools. You can truly understand how a page is used (where users click or even miss click, on which part of the page they are spending most of their time, if some links are clicked but bad positioned on the page...), and that's a thing you can't really measure trough a traditional web analytics tool.

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

• I learned how effective some of our image carousels were. How only 10% of a page visitors were being exposed to only the first slide. People were scrolling down or leaving the page without ever being exposed to 90% of the content. Once I provided this input to stakeholders it was an easy sell to redesign this aspect of the page.
• I used the mouse-move heat map to analyze user interaction with the footer. Showing stakeholders the before and after redesign heat maps did wonders for improving my credibility as an usability analyst.
• We used Clicktale to help analyze our 404 error page effectiveness. Our redesign gave us a 14% lower bounce rate on our redesigned 404 error page. Stakeholders appreciated a quantitative measure to gauge the success of that project.