Chartbeat begins rolling out radically new UI with emphasis on social traffic

After being announced about a month ago, analytics startup Chartbeat has finally begun to roll out its radically different user interface that prioritizes social traffic.

The move coincides with Chartbeat’s just-announced new funding round of $9.5 million led by DFJ and Saul Klein of Index Ventures. Chartbeat is raising money to help it hire aggressively and expand the product offering to compete better with Google Analytics.

As a Chartbeat lover who views the site a few times each hour, I’m always in the mood to go deeper with data to find out exactly where traffic is coming from. The site has prioritized social engagement and added new diagrams that help you better analyze traffic trends. On our site this morning, for example, “social” and “internal” traffic were beating out “search.”

“The big goal is to make everyone feel like a data scientist,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand, told us. “We want to make sure the people on the front lines of these sites feel like they can … understand, react, and predict how to capitalize on their traffic.”

The user interface now features five tabs in the top-left corner of the screen: Overview, Content, Social, Traffic Sources, and Geo. This is how Chartbeat describes each tab:

• Overview: A “how I’m doing right now” summary view
• Content: Deep-diveable view into how users are engaging with your content
• Social: Collective view of all your mentions, likes, shares, tweets
• Traffic Sources: View where your traffic is coming from and going to
• Geo: See where in the world people are coming from

Overall, we really like what we’re seeing. With more information about the people visiting the site, the better we can take advantage of those patterns and know when to publish stories and which social networks could use work. My fellow VentureBeat writers Devindra Hardawar and Jolie O’Dell were enthusastic about the changes, with O’Dell even calling it “sexy.”

Charts photo: Dusit/Shutterstock