Chartbeat delivers real-time analytics, insights, and transformative tools for content teams around the world, to help improve audience engagement, inform editorial decisions, and increase loyalty.
N/A
HitsLink
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
HitLinks is an inexpensive web analytics tools providing page view and unique visitor data to smaller site. Customers tend to be media sites with fairly simple analytics needs. The tools requires that some code be appended to all pages to be tracked, and does not offer any social media tracking.
$19.95
Pricing
Chartbeat
HitsLink
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
10,000 Page Views
$19.95
25,000 Page Views
$24.95
50,000 Page Views
$29.95
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Chartbeat
HitsLink
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Chartbeat pricing is based on monthly site page views. Discounts are applied to multi-year contracts. The Basic Plan includes the Real-time Dashboard, Historical Dashboard, Heads Up Display, Reports, Big Board, iOS and Android app, and Real-time API endpoints.
The Plus Plan includes all of the Basic Plan features, plus ONE of the following Premium features: Headline Testing, Advanced Queries, or Multi-Site View.
The Premium Plan includes all of the Basic Plan features, plus ALL Premium features: Headline Testing, Advanced Queries, Multi-Site View, and enterprise-level support and custom trainings.
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.
If you're looking for a comprehensive, user-friendly web analytics tool, you should definitely consider Hitslink. Before you subscribe to the software, take a test run on their Demo version of the site, as it behaves exactly like the full professional version. The biggest disadvantage is that Google+ registered users' search engine traffic data will be mostly (if not completely) blocked. However, this drawback is rarely a significant hindrance to analyzing your website's traffic, but it is something to be aware of.
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.
Specific information such as search term and geographic location is blocked for users coming into your site through Google who are also signed into a Google+ account, making it increasingly more difficult to analyze trends as more and more people acquire Google+ accounts. This is part of Google's strategy to make companies pay them directly through their Google Analytics software, and it is working against services like Hitslink.
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.
Hitslink is as useful as it is user-friendly. I haven't seen another website analytics tool as comprehensive and at the same time straightforward as this service. The only downside of Hitslink is Google's blocking of information from its registered Google+ users to the software. As Google+ continues to reign in more of the population, I can see this being a significant problem for Hitslink to overcome. However, there is still a vast majority of search engine users whose actions are visible through Hitslink, and as long as this stays the case, the service will be an invaluable tool for website administrators.
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.
The service is incredibly intuitive and very easy to learn. The only drawback is not having a mobile-optimized website to easily view website reports on the go. But on a PC or Mac, Hitslink is as user friendly as it gets. I have yet to see a navigation system on any SaaS website that makes a service that is this comprehensive seem so straight-forward.
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.
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
