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"Data is having a moment. Analytics are sexier than ever before, and metrics are drive decision-making and thus, boosting revenue. Not surprisingly, there are lots of data tools out there to parse your referral traffic, pageviews, time on page and more. But some people need to know what's happening now, how they can improve traffic immediately. That's where real-time analytics comes in, and if you ask CEO Tony Haile, that's where Chartbeat dominates.\nChartbeat went into beta on April 2, 2009. Today, it's a 33-person team, and a product used by tech and publishing heavyweights Foursquare, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Gilt Groupe. Chartbeat is an analytics tool for non-analytics people, and like many tech products, it took a pivot to find its groove. The service began as a tool called Firef.ly that let you see the cursor of other viewers on a given web page, and sort of looked like a firefly. \n\"It turned out the major use case was that someone would see another cursor and then hump it ... and that wasn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt going to be a billion-dollar business,\" says Haile. So Betaworks' Billy Chasen and John Borthwick took Chartbeat into the world of real-time analytics \u2014 Haile joined just before the beta launch while Chasen left shortly thereafter to found Stickybits and Turntable.fm. In August 2010, Chartbeat spun out of Betaworks with its $3 million Series A round.\nWe sat down with Haile to talk about the appeal of real-time, how innovation is done and media's new wave of data-miners.\nQ&amp;A With Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat\nTell me about how the Chartbeat product evolved.\n[After the Firefly pivot], we had this real-time analytics service, but we really had no idea what that meant, and no one else did either. To innovate, we decided to set some constraints. Because we came out of Betaworks, we knew that real-time was somehow different. We decided we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDd look at whatever Google Analytics did and do the opposite of that, as a test to see what would happen. Where every analytics service will tell you that the important thing is the history and being able to see trends, we said \"Screw it, we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDll throw out history after 30 days.\" Every analytics service lets you export to Excel. But we didn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt know how people were going to use this data, so not building in export functions made them ask us for functionality or views instead. We gave full access through the API, so we could see how other people were using it as well, and then we decided to charge for it, which Google thought was crazy; they actually told me I was crazy for charging, because Google Analytics was everywhere and free. But we knew that unless we charged, we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDd never discover what was special about real-time data \u2014 what are the kind of people who would use this data so much that they would pay for it? \nSo who was Chartbeat created for? What's the audience?\nAt the beginning, we didn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt really know. We thought medium-level blogs. We saw the big guys \u2014 Omniture, Coremetrics and Webtrends \u2014 out there with a million dollars a year in charges and incredibly well entrenched, and we saw Google Analytics as one hell of a price point. So we were going to be a small- to medium-sized product, with a $10 a month price point. \nBut then something weird happened. One, we found that for many bloggers, the average amount of traffic on their site at any given time was zero, so for them, Chartbeat could be an incredibly depressing product. But, all of a sudden, EA turned up and put us on every single one of their sites \u2014 and EA spends a huge sum each year on Omniture. And then Time.com and the Wall Street Journal and all these services, which should have just been using Omniture or Coremetrics, were using us. It was word of mouth. Even now, three years in, we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDve spent money on T-shirts, but apart from that, it\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs been almost no money on marketing. People find Chartbeat from other people talking about us. The WSJ heard about us because the head of product at Time said, \"Holy crap, have you seen this thing?\" \n\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDThis is the pulse of your company in real-time.\"\nSo we tried to figure out why the hell that was. We asked them, and it turns out that it wasn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt the same people within the organization who were using our data; it wasn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt the analytics guys and the people in the back office. It was the people on the front lines who were being asked to make fast tactical moves, who needed high-level, strategic insights. We realized that what we stumbled across was a fundamental change in how organizations work. Old analytics was meant for the old, command-and-control hierarchy of the business where you have your analytics team siloed away creating reports. That\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs incredibly powerful and useful; but it also can be slow, and decision-making was kept up high.\nThen you have the rise of the newer firm, with many layers fewer of management and democratized decision-making, but analytics hadn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt really evolved with it. So there was this huge gap between the people who need data to make decisions and the traditional analytics services that are out there. The poor analytics teams were trying their hardest to get their message across, but they couldn\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt keep up with the cadence that was necessary. So Chartbeat essentially found this whole new market of people who had previously just been told what to do and are now having to make decisions and needing data to do so. That\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs what we doubled-down on. Today, we still have people paying us $10 a month, but we also have companies paying us $30,000 a month, especially on the publishing side of things.\nWhat are some of these decisions that have to be made?\nIt all comes down to positive and negative feedback loops. You want to intensify positive feedback loops when you can. When a story is spiking, how can you pour fuel onto it to make it go even bigger? Especially in cases when the social web picks up on an unusual or unexpected story, we help your team swing it to its peak. There\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs also negative feedback, which is what you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre trying to adjust. It\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs like a thermostat \u2014 ask yourself, Is this where it should be? Is what I thought was most interesting on the homepage what users think is most interesting on the homepage? Where do I need to adjust? Is the story performing as well as it should be?  Is it getting enough search traffic? Have I done my SEO right? Have I promoted it well enough on social? You\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDll find that most people at companies using Chartbeat have it opened on second screens all day; we make their people better. We have incredible engagement because of those constant decisions you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre making all day long. \nWhat makes Chartbeat so innovative?\n\n\n\n\nWhere we have been innovative is that we chose not to follow the traditional path of \u00EF\u00BF\u00BDthis is data for data experts.\u00EF\u00BF\u00BD So there\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs a brand new use case for data. That use case is swift tactical news in response to feedback from your environment, rather than trends over time. The way we build is fundamentally different. When people see Chartbeat for the first time, they say it\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs like nothing they\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDve ever seen before. It\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs a fundamentally different service for a fundamentally different group of people. So the way we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDve had to innovate is in communicating a different kind of data to a different kind of people. \nTraditional analytics services capture information on page load and then wait until the next page load or the next \"event\" to do it again. Chartbeat is getting pings every few seconds from the site. The difference is the richness of the data \u2014 it\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs the difference between the guy standing outside the stadium watching to see how many people go through the turnstile, and the cameraman inside the stadium who can say, this many people are on the field, this many people are cheering, this many people are waiting for hot dogs. You can get a much richer understanding. The core numbers that we care about are concurrency and engaged time. Concurrency is the number of people simultaneously on the site right now. That number is really useful because, if you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre an editor or a producer, you can move that number in one of two ways. You can either bring in more people to your site, or you can make them stay longer and increase the engagement. If you move this number \u2014 either way you do it \u2014 you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre doing well.\nTime on site has always been less than accurate \u2014 you open tabs and then do other things. This is the problem Google Analytics Real-Time has \u2014 they don\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDt know how long you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre on, so they just assume that it\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs five minutes. We can get a really accurate idea of time on site. We can track if this is the window in focus and if you're actually attentive in the past 15 seconds, be it moving a mouse, scrolling or anything to suggest you haven't gone to get coffee. And then we can accumulate that, and it gives you a dramatically different view of your site. For sites, that has two purposes. You want to be able to bring in new visitors, and concurrency is a fantastic measure of that; immediately you can adapt and drive new visitors. And then engaged time is a really good way to understand what the content and what pages are creating loyal visitors. If you do those two things, you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDll be a success in the publishing world. The two Chartbeat metrics are perfectly aligned with those two things.\nWith the rise of the social web, would you say your timing was perfect?\n\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDIt\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs a fundamentally different service for a fundamentally different group of people.\"\nYeah, absolutely. We work across a number of different verticals, with brands like Starbucks and Foursquare and Gilt Groupe and Fab. But in publishing in particular, there was a happy serendipity. The need to adjust and adapt to your environment is more important, the more complex your environment is. Before the social web, we had our ways of driving traffic, we had a homepage, search strategy and audience development partners and people who would link to us, and it was great. With the rise of the Twitters, Facebooks and Reddits of the web, suddenly the environment you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre dealing with is so much more complex, and your ability to manage and predict it is dramatically diminished. That\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs where real-time data and the ability to adapt to that new complexity was so important. Certainly it was a good moment for Chartbeat to be born.\nHow do you see the product evolving?\nFor us, it\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs moving deeper and deeper into those front-line people and helping them make decisions and understand the impact of their decisions. We want to understand the full feedback loop and enable them to see that something\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs happening and take action on it and see the impact of that action. If we can do that, if we can make it so that all the people right now who are currently just relying on guts and instinct can support that with actual data, the transformation across business will be immense. \nHow do ecommerce sites use Chartbeat?\nFor ecommerce sites, one of the most important things is to understand on-page demand. If you know on-page demand and inventory numbers, you can adjust marketing choices and what you're promoting on the page, just as you would with content. What\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs working on our homepage? What\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs not working on our homepage? Is there a big spike to a particular item? How can we maximize sell-through? So you have some similar use cases and some very different use cases. \nAs we go into more and more areas, we think about not just web data, but all that social data that we can bring in in real time to those front-line teams. We\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDve got Twitter data and Facebook data, we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre bringing in other sources, too, and we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre partnering with other organizations who want to put their data in front of people in a way that they understand. Then suddenly, you\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre able to give someone an idea of their complete environment \u2014 this is the pulse of your company in real-time, delivered directly to the people who can make changes. \nAs a leader, how do you inspire innovation at Chartbeat?\nEvery six weeks, we have an entire week of exploratory time, where people can work on whatever they want, and they have to ship and demo by the end of the week. Everyone\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs creativity can be expressed, and we get to see things we never would have thought of otherwise (a recent product was real-time chess, another was an ASCII version of the Chartbeat dashboard). We like tinkering. \nThe other thing we do is spend more time than most out with our customers, sitting down and working with them \u2014 that\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs a constant thing for us, and we learn a huge amount from our customers. \nLastly, we\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre very collaborative. There\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDs a limit to how much creativity I \u2014 or anyone \u2014 can have on my own, but the cumulative creativity is immense. Six of our people are doing the intensive front-end course at General Assembly; none of them are developers. They\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDre all learning to code so they can better understand across the business and we can come up with better ideas. Giving people time to explore has worked out pretty well for us.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, TimArbaev"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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