Chartbeat vs. smartocto

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

smartocto is very well suited to measuring blog performance, gaining insights into topics that resonate & measuring how well your content team is performing. It makes for a good, user-friendly alternative to GA4. It could do with better SEO tracking features as this is what most B2B content teams are focused on.

• 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

• Providing actionable data the moment that you need it
• Providing a clear and easy to use UX
• Very flexible when it comes to the configuration for your particular business

• 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

• CPI is sometimes harder to understand but once you do it is of great help for business strategy
• Video content analysis could be improved but it is sufficient enough.

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.

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

smartocto is a very user-friendly tool, with a smart & clean interface.

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

Google Analytics is a general type analytics better suited for sales than media environment. It gives good overview data but it is hard to setup a system in a newsroom where you could make data driven decisions on future content. smartocto is editorial analytics suite and is easier to use in a newsroom.

• 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

• We have onboarded 70 old-school journalists to daily reporting and data retrospect. The a/b testing solution had proven that we have drastically improved our CTR.