To improve the quality and breadth of historical data in our systems, Chartbeat is rolling out a new set of data infrastructure powering our Historical Dashboard, Reports, and Advanced Queries products.
What are the changes occurring?
Chartbeat will be migrating the Historical Dashboard, Reports, and Advanced Queries to be powered by an improved backend system. Additionally, during this migration Chartbeat will be standardizing the definitions applied to sections, authors, and titles across all of these products.
What are the benefits of these changes?
In the short term, these changes will result in improved consistency between products. In the longer term, we will use this new system to provide new historical data capabilities in Chartbeat product offerings.
How will these changes affect my data?
Below are the specific improvements you may see as a user of each of these products:
- Data alignment: Improved alignment between data in the Historical Dashboard and Advanced Queries. Fixes an issue in which some customers have seen numbers in their Historical Dashboards that do not exactly match what is pulled from Advanced Queries.
- Improved reporting on low-traffic stories: Fixes an issue where stories falling outside of a site’s top 500 stories might not appear in the Historical Dashboard.
- Title, section, and author definitions: Chartbeat will be introducing a new algorithm for assigning traffic to sections, authors, and titles. With this change, we will continuously detect the sections, authors, and title assigned to each story and credit traffic to the current values of those fields. This will resolve several issues some customers have reported:
- Fixes an issue some customers have reported in Advanced Queries, where reports utilizing the Section or Author fields see old or incorrect values for some stories.
- Fixes an issue some customers have reported in Advanced Queries, where a single article may show up multiple times with different titles in a report grouping on title.
- Improves consistency of data between Historical Dashboard, Reports, and Advanced Queries.
- Allows for the removal of the Dynamic Section, Dynamic Author, and Dynamic Title fields in Advanced Queries. Existing reports utilizing these fields will be automatically migrated to use these improved values.
- Benchmarking improvements: Because the assignment of Sections and Authors to stories will be improved, benchmarks of Section and Author performance in Reports and Historical Dashboard will see improved accuracy.
When will these changes take place?
We will be releasing these changes in two stages, first changing over the Historical Dashboard and Reports together to the new system, and then Advanced Queries. We expect the first stage to take place in mid-November, and the second to take place in mid-December.
No action is required on your part. We will send an email to all account owners and notify all users on your account via a banner at the top of our dashboards approximately one week before each of these releases.
Will my existing Reports or Advanced Queries subscriptions be affected?
Chartbeat will be automatically migrating existing Reports and Advanced Queries subscriptions, and no action is required on your part.
However, note that if your report filters on Section or Author, bear in mind that Chartbeat’s definitions of these fields will have changed with the migration. Consequently, your levels of traffic in these reports may change when the new system is released.
What should analytics teams do to prepare for these changes?
We recommend rectifying inconsistencies in your Chartbeat tracking code implementation of page section, author, and title data across platforms, to ensure accurate traffic totals in your Chartbeat tools after the changes are released.
Where might these changes be particularly noticeable in my data and reporting?
Some clients use our Advanced Queries API to regularly import historical data into their data lake for ongoing time-series benchmarking on certain sections and/or authors. If you’re one of these clients, you may notice a change in the levels of traffic from these recurring AQ queries, given the new algorithmic assignment of traffic to sections/authors/titles.
Where should I go with questions or concerns?
Please reach out to support@chartbeat.com.