The Heads Up Display was designed to give you your data where it's most actionable: right on your home, article, and landing pages. It allows you to make fast real-time decisions based on your audience's interaction with your stories. The Heads Up Display will show your top performing stories, find your hidden high-potential opportunities, and makes it easy to review the performance of a link and see where exactly your audience is actively reading.
Main Metrics
Clicks Per Minute - A real-time representation of the clicks per minute that a link is receiving. Rather than averaging a click number over a time period, our algorithm looks at the entire history of clicks for a link in that position, gives more weight to clicks that happened more recently, and outputs its best guess of the expected number of clicks in the next minute.
Quality Clicks - A click that results in at least 15 seconds of reader engaged time on the subsequent article page. Relying solely on click-through-rate to determine homepage optimization disregards the visitor's experience with the content itself. Quality Clicks offers the perfect compromise – it identifies content that is not only popular but also interesting enough to hold visitors' attention for more than just the first few lines.
Activation
To get started with Heads Up Display (HUD), first make sure you’re signed in to Chartbeat. Under the 'Optimization' section of the left-hand navigation bar, click Heads Up Display. Then select Get Heads Up Display, choose a site, and click Activate Heads Up Display.
For more detailed instructions, see Activate Heads Up Display. Having trouble? Check out our troubleshooting steps.
Heads Up Display Dock
Once you've installed the Heads Up Display in your browser, you'll see the dock appear on the right-hand side of your screen. The Chartbeat logo lets you navigate around the Publishing Suite, and you can use the toggle to collapse the HUD interface without uninstalling it.
Concurrents
The first number under that is concurrents, the number of people on the page in real-time. When you select it, it opens a card with some historical information on the number of concurrents over the past two hours, broken out into their visitor frequency buckets.
Depending on your page's performance you might see contextual information — either a green arrow pointing up or a red arrow pointing down. This gives you an idea of how the current audience size compares to the average number of visitors to that page that we've seen previously at this time.
Page Performance
The next set of numbers compare the total number of clicks per minute occurring on that page in real-time, and beneath that, the percentage of them that are considered 'Quality Clicks'. A quality click means that after a reader clicked through to the article page, they spent at least 15 seconds of engaged time actually reading the content.
In the default view on the dock, the page performance tells you how many clicks per minute the entire page is getting compared to your benchmark for that hour of the day on a weekday or weekend. Select the clicks per minute section and it opens a card with some historical information on the ratio of clicks to quality clicks over the past two hours, as well as the top ten links on the page ranked by their clicks per minute.
Device Type Filters
Finally, the Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet section tells you the percentage of concurrents currently viewing the page with each device type. You can filter on each device type to see how visitors experiencing the various layouts of your page are interacting differently.
This allows you to seamlessly simulate your visitors' mobile experience and adapt your page design based on just that audience's behavior. If you're filtered on mobile, remember to shrink your browser width to between 300px and 400px so as to simulate your mobile visitors' experience. See what they see and see what they're doing — clicks, quality clicks, and scroll depth.
Article Performance Pins
The Heads Up Display uses numbered and colored pins to show you link performance for stories on your homepage. The number inside the pin is the article's ranking in terms of clicks per minute: the lower the number, the more clicks the link is receiving. The color gives you an idea of how a given links' clicks per minute compares to an article's usual performance in that position.
Our clicks per minute metric is a real-time representation of the click activity that a link is receiving. Rather than averaging a click number over a time period, a machine learning algorithm looks at the entire history of clicks for a link in that position, gives more weight to clicks that happened more recently, and outputs the number of clicks we expect the article to receive in the next minute.
Our system will stop tracking click activity only if we're confident no one is clicking on it anymore. So we'll keep building models for articles that are getting less than 0.1 CPM until we're sure that it's really getting zero clicks.
For more information on a link's metrics, simply select the pin and a card expands with more details, including the percentage of quality clicks, link performance over the last two hours, and the average engaged time people are spending on that article.
Clicks vs. Quality Clicks
We've always informed you on which links are receiving the highest clicks per minute, but by comparing those clicks to Quality Clicks (stories which are receiving at least 15 seconds of post-click engagement), you can see which stories are driving more people actually reading, not just landing on, your highest quality content.
Quality Clicks are a powerful metric for homepage editors. Relying solely on clicks per minute to determine homepage optimization disregards the visitor's experience with the content itself. Quality Clicks offers the perfect compromise – it identifies content that is not only popular but also interesting enough to hold visitors' attention for more than just the first few lines.
Velocity Chevrons
The colored chevrons visible next to the clicks per minute ranking number as well as in the Article Performance card indicate the real-time trend of the associated article's clicks per minute. Even without expanding the entire card you can see at a glance if a link is gaining or losing traction. The new colored chevrons alert you to when an article on your homepage is trending up or down in traffic, so you can take action to capitalize on an article that's gaining traction, or take time to update one that's decreasing in traffic.
Pin Colors
The color refers to that links' relative performance given what Chartbeat is used to seeing for a link in that position at a certain time — for that hour of the day on a weekday or weekend. Green pins are overperforming—articles that are doing better than usual in that position during this time. Red pins are the opposite; for whatever reason an article is receiving fewer clicks than an article usually does in that position.
Scroll Depth
The Heads Up Display offers two different ways to look at scroll depth.
The default view gives you a historical look at the max scroll depth for everyone in the last 3 hours. Now you can easily see how far people typically scroll down a given page.
Selecting the Scroll Depth Bar switches to the second view. The expanded teal bars show where high percentages of visitors stopped scrolling on the page.
The bigger the bar, the more visitors that stopped. When you see a bar that extends far into the page, you have an opportunity to determine what made those visitors stop scrolling — maybe it's a link, a video, or some other visual.
Article View
When you open the Heads Up Display on an article page, you'll see a slightly modified version of the dock.
The first difference is in the Concurrents section of the dock. When you select the concurrents metric, the graph is broken out into traffic sources instead of visitor frequency so you can get a better sense of how people are finding this article.
Instead of displaying page-wide clicks per minute and quality clicks, we'll show you the average engaged time and recirculation percentage in real time for all visitors on this article.
There's also an easy link to jump right into that page's entry in Real-Time or Historical so you can quickly get more data on that audience.