On Wednesday at an Advertising Week event in New York, a group of marketers sat down with Tumblr executives to talk about their experiences working with the micro-blogging site’s five-month-old ad products. The marketers, who were from Adidas and Coca-Cola, had plenty of positive things to say about their campaigns, but chief among their future requests was one thing: analytics.
In reply, Lee Brown, Tumblr’s new head of global sales, said, “Stay tuned.”
Apparently, they didn’t have to stay tuned for too long. This afternoon, Tumblr announced that it’s partnered with Union Metrics to offer the first comprehensive analytics platform for brands and marketers.
Through social media data provider Gnip, Union Metrics will access the full firehose of Tumblr data to help brands make sense of the activity on Tumblr’s over 70 million blogs and 32 million blog posts. Starting today, the platform will be available on an invitation-only basis, but it will soon expand to the public.
Among the platform’s offerings:
- Filtering capabilities to track any blog or topic
- Summary analytics showing overall engagement and trends over tieme
- Identification of the most influential contributors
- Analysis of posts and tags to surface the most popular content
- Individual post-engagement analysis
At Wednesday’s panel, brand marketers said that success on Tumblr means engagement and amplification within the Tumblr community — it’s not necessarily the number of likes or reblogs, but seeing how Tumblr users add to and recreate content. To date, Tumblr users have been able to track traffic through Google Analytics, as well as monitor basic activity such as likes and reblogs. But as brands put more money into Tumblr campaigns, they’ll increasingly need to track the metrics that show that their investments are worthwhile. Partnering with Union Metrics is a natural next step, as well as a necessary one, for Tumblr as the company establishes itself as a new platform for advertising.
