• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 16, 2012

Hoping to scale its real-time analytics service, Chartbeat just closed a $9.5 million Series B round of funding led by Josh Stein at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Saul Klein at Index Ventures.

Since its launch, Chartbeat has assembled an impressive list of clients, including ESPN, Fox News, The New York Times, Forbes, Fab.com, and Gilt Groupe. With their cooperation, Chartbeat says it can take a real-time pulse of roughly 5 million Web users at any given moment.

“Saul has been a constant friend and guide over the last three years, and helped us take the time to find the right partner,” explained Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat. “We found that partner in Josh Stein.” Coinciding with its investment, Chartbeat this week is rolling out several new features, including a newly designed dashboard.

Set to debut over the next few days, the new dashboard includes a new “Engaged Time” metric, which doesn’t count viewership when site visitors have windows open in another tab, or when they aren’t actively viewing, reading, or commenting on a given page.

“For the very first time, [clients] can finally go beyond eyeballs and clicks and understand which content is making an impact, what’s engaging people’s heads and hearts,” Haile promised.

Another new feature, Peer Stats, attempts to put client data in context with the anonymized, aggregated stats of their sites -- in real time -- while a new Social View service integrates social data directly into clients’ dashboards.

A new app, meanwhile, will send clients real-time data directly to their iPhones and iPads.

Along with established data trackers like Nielsen, comScore, and eMarketer, Chartbeat is competing against similarly small startups like Tickr.com.

With systems like Tickr's and Chartbeat.com, publishers can refine data in an infinite number of ways, and examine it in real time, giving marketers opportunities to respond at a moment's notice.