Used For

• +**Your viral post is getting clicks but people bounce after 10 seconds** → See real engagement time and traffic quality, not vanity metrics
• +**You're posting on social but have no idea what actually drives readers back** → Track which platforms send visitors who stick around (Twitter beats Reddit 2:1)
• +**Your team argues about what content works based on gut feelings** → Filter by author, section, or traffic source to see what's actually performing
• +Shows 'dark social' traffic from email and messaging apps - the stuff Google Analytics misses completely

Best For

• >Publishers watching traffic spikes and wanting to capitalize immediately
• >Content teams tired of guessing which stories are actually engaging people
• >Social media managers who need to know which tweets are driving real readers (not just likes)

Not For

• -Small blogs under 10k monthly visitors — you'll be staring at mostly empty dashboards
• -Companies wanting historical reporting and trends — this is about right now, not last quarter
• -Anyone on a tight budget — built for publishers who can justify premium pricing for real-time insights

Pairs With

• *Google Analytics (for historical data and detailed funnels that Chartbeat doesn't do)
• *Hootsuite or Buffer (to quickly promote the posts Chartbeat shows are taking off)
• *Slack (where editors get alerts about traffic spikes and coordinate real-time response)
• *WordPress or Ghost (the actual CMS where you'll push the hot content to your homepage)
• *CrowdTangle (Facebook's tool that Chartbeat integrates with for social monitoring)
• *Mailchimp (to blast newsletters about the content that's proven to engage readers)

The Catch

• !You'll become addicted to checking it every 10 minutes instead of writing more content
• !The 'dark social' detection isn't perfect — it assumes complex URLs without referrers came from messaging apps
• !Most valuable during breaking news or viral moments, pretty boring during slow news cycles

Bottom Line

Shows who's actually reading your stuff right now so you can double down on what's working before the moment passes.