Chartbeat’s New Dashboard Plugs Publishers’ Video Data Into Their Real-Time Analytics

Chartbeat is launching what CEO Tony Haile told me has been the big “missing piece” from its real-time analytics product for publishers — a video dashboard.

“And not just missing for us, but largely a missing piece for publishers, too,” he said.

By that, Haile means video data is usually stuck in a separate application, and therefore analyzed completely separately, by a separate team, from the rest of the site. Plus, because the analytics can be so expensive, publishers often cut the data that they receive.

Chartbeat takes a different approach by integrating video data into its general analytics tool. So when you look at the traffic and engagement data for your site, videos will be included, and when you look at the data for an individual page, you’ll see how a specific video (if there is one) contributes to the engagement time on that page. Haile said this can help publishers understand how videos fit in to their broader editorial strategy, and whether there are areas where they should be including more videos or promoting videos more prominently.

Chartbeat Video Pivot

And there’s unique data that tells publishers about the performance of each video — not just how many people watched a video and for how long, but also how many people dropped off when the ads started, and how each of those metrics compare to videos with similar characteristics (primarily length).

It sounds like some of those features came out of Chartbeat’s early tests with publishers, including the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC. Haile said one tone of the big things he took away from those tests was the need to answer the question “Are we putting our resources to work in the right way with video?” That’s not something you can answer by just throwing a bunch of numbers at a publisher, he said, which is why Chartbeat tries to place the data in context, and even summarizes the engagement data with a single engagement score.

Head of Brand Lauryn Bennett noted that the company is hoping the video numbers, just like all Chartbeat data, are used by the broader company, not just the analytics team or the video team.

“This last part is pretty important,” she said. “It’s bringing together teams. Video content is now everyone’s job.”

Haile added that Chartbeat is offering a “generic SDK” that should work with “most videos.” It has also built a Brightcove plug-in and is working on similar plug-ins for Ooyala and HTML5.