
Chartbeat is to Blogs as Google Analytics is to Print Newspapers - rpledge
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/18/charbeat-is-to-blogs-as-google-analytics-is-to-print-newspapers/
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byoung2
Shouldn't that title be "Chartbeat is to Google Analytics as Blogs are to
Print Newspapers"

As in, Chartbeat is a more up-to-the-minute version of Google Analytics in the
same way blogs are a more up-to-the-minute version of newspapers?

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petercooper
Yeah, after seeing the post I thought the title didn't make sense either. I
thought it was going to be _critical_ of Chartbeat and the title was implying
it's as irrelevant to blogs as GA would be to newspapers.. :-)

(But I might be biased as I tried Chartbeat twice - forgetting about it in the
gap - and didn't like it either time.)

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mikecane
Note that the 30-day trial is free ONLY if you give them your credit card
number. Why should I worry about them having that information if I decide not
to do it? Why shouldn't they do the work on their end of just killing my trial
account if I don't sign up after 30 days? "Free" should be FREE. Not
provisionally so.

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davidw
This would be a very interesting statistic to gather. I could see it going
both ways. Requiring a CC up front might eliminate a lot of "dead weight" who
will never pay, but might also eliminate some people who would.

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terra_t
Sensei taught me two things about web analytics, when it comes to making money
online:

(1) Checking your stats too much is a disease: if looking at stats isn't going
to changbe your behavior, it's a waste of time (2) Monthly revenue is the one
web statistic that matters

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jonknee
That analogy not only works for speed, but for depth of content. Google
Analytics isn't used so you can stroke your ego during your lunch break, it's
used to optimize your site over the long haul. Conversion/goal tracking is
pretty much the entire reason it exists. It would be nice if they had a real
time component so you can see spikes in traffic (and more importantly where
they are coming from), but GA is all about maximizing your sales and thus
making you spend more on AdWords.

Alos, using spammers like Mahalo as a use case isn't a great sales pitch. They
have to react in real time because their phony content doesn't have lasting
impact.

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prosa
Is Chartbeat a drop-in replacement for Google Analytics, or are people using
it as a supplement for real-time data?

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rossriley
We're using both on certain sites. It's certainly not a replacement for
Analytics.

The most useful for us has been the page load time analysis, it's a great way
to see exactly how long pages are taking to load for a user as opposed to
measuring server response time.

