Just because you have access to data doesn’t mean you know how to use it or what to make of it. To address that gap, there’s a great emerging startup category of web-based analytics and visualizations products. I had a chance today to catch up with Metricly, a San Francisco-based company that just launched into public beta with the simple premise of making its customers an aggregated dashboard of all their web analytics systems, both external and internal databases. Other new analytics companies include Chart.io and Leftronic, both from the most recent Y Combinator class.
The Metricly system currently plugs into 15 sources of data — things like Google Analytics, MailChimp and Twitter. In many cases, the Metricly interface makes it easier to parse data than the source itself (though I’m sure that’s not always true). For instance, Metricly can cross-match data for up to 60 sites in a single graph, whereas Google Analytics maxes out at one.
The main Metricly interface is a stack of line graphs configured for your needs, with recent trends highlighted. Metricly currently doesn’t do a lot of analysis or make recommendations; its main purpose is just getting all that data into one place. The service sends weekly summary emails and soon it will also offer notifications for any unusual data trends.
Metricly was founded by Devin Poolman, Jason DeFillippo and Paul Cloutier, who were all previously at 8020 Media (creator of JPG Magazine). The company is angel-backed by investors such as Paige Craig and Wasabi Ventures and is currently raising funding. For now Metricly services are all free but premium plans for additional services like connecting to your own database for a custom feed will eventually cost $ 50-100 per user per month. So far about 1,300 users have signed up (the private beta launched earlier this year), with 40 percent logging in every month. Poolman said his target customers are startups, e-commerce and content companies, and teams in larger organizations. Obviously a big focus for Metricly is integrating more data sources, and to that effect DeFillippo has created a plug-in API that will be opened to any service that wants to join. It’s a race to make the product indispensable for its users.
A significant new expansion for Metricly is a partnership with Etsy that launched a few days ago. Etsy sellers previously had very little insight into their transactions besides a simple list of sold items. Metricly is now providing Etsy sellers with free dashboards to break down their total sales by time and location, average sales price, repeat customers versus new customers, and other filters.
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