Chartbeat Cohorts is a new Chartbeat product that allows publishers to make informed content decisions and stay ahead of the competition with benchmarking data. Using this product helps publishers leverage Chartbeat's incomparable data set of over 600 global publishers to see how they measure up. Publishers can view traffic and engagement performance by topic and at the site level compared to similar publishers.
- Navigating to Cohorts
- Site Level Cohorts dashboard
- Topic Level Cohorts dashboards
- Available Metrics
- Navigating between the Cohorts dashboards
- FAQs
Navigating to Chartbeat Cohorts
The Cohorts product can be found in the dashboards section in the left navigation of the product.
The Site Level Cohorts Dashboard
The site level dashboard allows you to compare your sites to cohorts of publishers based on 3 different attributes
On the left side of the dashboard, choose which site you want to compare and what cohort (group of sites) you'd like to compare it to by selecting attributes for each cohort.
- Date Range: Choose the date range between which the data should be displayed
- My site: Choose the site for which you want to view benchmarks
- Cohort: Hand select the cohort to compare yourself against by choosing values for the 3 different attributes: Site Size, Site Category, Site Region
Site Size
| Site Size | Average Monthly Pageviews |
| Large | PV >= 100,000,000 |
| Medium | 10,000,000 >= PV < 100,000,000 |
| Small | 1,000,000 >= PV < 10,000,000 |
| X-Small | PV < 1,000,000 |
Site Category
Choose from the following categories:
- Broadcast, Cable, Radio, Film
- Cars, Trucks & Racing
- Digital First Media
- Entertainment
- Film & Movies
- Food & Drink
- Gaming
- General Interest
- Magazine & Newspaper
- Media
- News & Politics
- People & Blogs
- Science & Tech
- Sports
- Sports Teams & Leagues
Site Region
Choose from the following regions:
- Brazil
- British Isles
- Central America
- Central Asia
- Developed APAC
- Eastern Europe
- Middle East
- North America
- Oceania
- Scandinavia
- South America
- Southeast Asia
- Southern Europe
- Western Europe
Keep in mind:
- To maintain complete anonymity and ensure data remains fully aggregated, we enforce a minimum threshold for the number of accounts in a Cohort. If you select multiple attributes and the dashboard data is not loading, try selecting broader criteria to expand the cohort.
- You may not be able to view all cohort attributes due to what your account has purchased.
The right side of the dashboard then loads the different widgets showing you how your site is doing relative to the selected Cohort.
- Site Overview: A view over time of how your site is performing relative to the Cohort. This view is available across 4 different metrics- Pageviews, Average Engaged Time, Uniques and
- Recirculation: This graph shows raw totals and is not broken down by any metric– it will continue to show the raw numbers even when the Pageviews(%) or Uniques(%) metrics are chosen.
Breakdown by Traffic Source
The bar chart compares your site's traffic to the cohort's traffic broken down by Traffic Source.
The line graph shows a view over time of how your site is performing relative to the Cohort for the chosen Traffic Source- direct, external, internal, search, or social. This view is available across six different metrics:
- Pageviews by percentage - Pageviews(%)
- Raw Pageviews - Pageviews(#)
- Average Engaged Time
- Uniques by Percentage - Uniques(%)
- Raw Uniques - Uniques(#)
- Site level Recirculation
Breakdown by Subscriber Type
The bar chart compares your site's traffic to the cohort's traffic broken down by Subscriber Type.
The line graph shows a view over time of how your site is performing relative to the Cohort for the chosen Subscriber Type- anon, guest, subscriber, or registered. This view is available across six different metrics:
- Pageviews by percentage - Pageviews(%)
- Raw Pageviews - Pageviews(#)
- Average Engaged Time
- Uniques by Percentage - Uniques(%)
- Raw Uniques - Uniques(#)
- Site level Recirculation
Breakdown by Visitor Frequency
The bar chart compares your site's traffic to the cohort's traffic broken down by Visitor Frequency .
The line graph shows a view over time of how your site is performing relative to the Cohort for the chosen Visitor Frequency - loyal, new, returning, or unclassified. The Unclassified category makes up the group of visitors that do not store their visit frequency. This includes those who opt out of tracking cookies and those arriving through distribution channels that do not collect this data, like AMP pages and visitors in the Apple News app. This view is available across six different metrics:
- Pageviews by percentage - Pageviews(%)
- Raw Pageviews - Pageviews(#)
- Average Engaged Time
- Uniques by Percentage - Uniques(%)
- Raw Uniques - Uniques(#)
- Site level Recirculation
Breakdown by Device
The bar chart compares your site's traffic to the cohort's traffic broken down by Device.
The line graph shows a view over time of how your site is performing relative to the Cohort for the chosen Device - desktop, mobile or tablet. This view is available across six different metrics:
- Pageviews by percentage - Pageviews(%)
- Raw Pageviews - Pageviews(#)
- Average Engaged Time
- Uniques by Percentage - Uniques(%)
- Raw Uniques - Uniques(#)
- Site level Recirculation
Top referrers by Cohort
The bar graph shows your site's traffic relative to the cohort's traffic broken down by the top referrers in the Cohort. This view is available across three different metrics:
- Pageviews by percentage - Pageviews(%)
- Raw Pageviews - Pageviews(#)
- Average Engaged Time
The Topic Level Cohorts Dashboards
In addition to site level benchmarks, the topic level dashboard allows you to compare your site's coverage of specific topics to other publishers' coverage of the same topic. You can currently compare your topic coverage to publishers either in your geographical region or to the Chartbeat network at large. This can be accessed via the tabs at the bottom of the page.
Available Metrics
You can view the topic level dashboard summarized by Engaged Time or Pageviews. You can toggle between the two by clicking on the tabbed headers at the top of the dashboards or the tabs at the bottom of the page.
On the left side of the dashboard, choose which site you want to compare and whether you want to compare to other sites in your region or all sites in the Chartbeat network.
- Date Range: Choose the date range between which the data should be displayed
- My site: Choose the site for which you want to view benchmarks.
- Cohort: Select either your local region or Chartbeat's Global network to compare yourself against.
Once the controls have been chosen, the “My topics by <metric>” widget will be populated with a list of topics to choose from.
You can choose a topic by clicking on one of the topics in this list or by using the drop down to search for a specific topic.
The charts on the right side of the dashboard display data specific to the chosen topic. These charts will not load until a topic is selected.
- Time series view: View the chosen metric over the time range chosen both for your site and the cohort.
- Top stories view: View your site's top stories by Pageviews or Average Engaged time for the chosen topic.
- Loyalty breakdown: View a bar chart showing your site's coverage of the topic compared to the cohort for the different loyalty types: loyal, new, returning, and unknown. The unknown category makes up the group of visitors that do not store their visit frequency. This includes those who opt out of tracking cookies and those arriving through distribution channels that do not collect this data, like AMP pages and visitors in the Apple News app.
- Referrer breakdown: View a bar chart showing your site's coverage of the topic compared to the cohort for the different referrer types: external, internal, search, and social.
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Device breakdown: View a bar chart showing your site's coverage of the topic compared to the cohort for the different device types: desktop, mobile, and tablet.
The list of “Topics not covered by my site” gives you insight into topics that you are not covering but the cohort is writing about and getting significant traffic or engagement.
Navigating between the Cohorts dashboards
You can navigate between the site level and topic level dashboards using the tabs at the bottom of the page:
FAQs
What's the best cohort for me to compare myself against?
Reach out to our support team (support@chartbeat.com) for insight into the best cohort to compare yourself against. As we evolve the product, our team can assist with helping you identify your best options.
How are site Sizes determined?
Chartbeat categorizes sights by average monthly pageviews. The breakdown is as follows:
- Extra-Small: Less than 1 million monthly pageviews
- Small: 1 million to 10 million monthly pageviews
- Medium: 10 million to 100 million monthly pageviews
- Large: More than 100 million monthly pageviews
What does “percentage of Pageviews” mean in the topic level dashboard?
This denotes the share of pageviews on your site for the selected time range that are specific to articles about the chosen topic. For eg: 5% of all the page views that came to your site in this time period were for the topic “Taylor Swift.”
What does “External” mean in the traffic source widgets?
External traffic is the same as “Links” in the Real Time and Historical dashboards. This denotes the people who are visiting through any external link, such as blogs and news sites.
How can I be sure other publishers are not able to access or see my data in Cohorts?
Our data science team has ensured that only cohorts with enough different publishers and sites in the data set to sufficiently anonymize the data are available in the product. If parameters are selected to create a cohort with too few publishers or sites, the data will not be available. In addition, all the data is aggregated - there is nowhere in the product that a data point will come from a single publisher, and there is no ability for accounts to view the names of other accounts or customers who are part of different cohorts inside the product.
Why can't I view certain combinations of cohorts?
In order to maintain anonymity of publishers, we have guardrails in place to prevent cohorts with too few sites included from being viewed.