Source Metrics is the latest evolution of Swix, a company started by local tech entrepreneur Scott Lake, who is also the co-founder and former president of Shopify.
Swix - an OBJ Startup to Watch in 2010 - specialized in measuring the success of different social media marketing campaigns. Mr. Lakes says the early iterations were essentially a “monitoring” or “listening” function focused on, for example, counting the number of clicks on a Twitter link, and how many times that link was retweeted.
Not only is the tool itself evolved, but the company is adjusting its target market.
“We realized we were going after the wrong organizations,” says Mr. Lake.
“Small businesses are just happy to get followers. They’re not at the point of dissecting campaigns. We wanted to sell pretty far upstream to companies that are very active in social marketing.”
With Source Metrics, Mr. Lake says he is targeting advertising agencies that are running social marketing campaigns for large clients, as well as the in-house marketing departments of big companies.
The new platform integrates social media publishing, campaign tracking, as well as listening and engagement functions.
Mr. Lake says the nature of social media means traditional tools such as Google Analytics make it difficult to accurately measure specific marketing campaign.
Consider the case of a company publishing a link on Twitter. That link is republished on a blog and then posted on Facebook, where a user clicks on it. Google Analytics would say the click came through Facebook, even though the inbound traffic actually originated from the Twitter campaign.
“We get away from that misleading data that you get with last-touch attribution,” says Mr. Lake.
“Whenever someone shows up on one of our pages, we know the original thing they clicked on.”
The next step, he says, is integrating the ability to create landing pages into the company’s software. That will then allow Source Metrics to to start creating lead generation databases for clients and go back to all the people with whom they’ve connected to using social media.
Source Metrics currently has 11 employees in Ottawa. The $1.6 million in funding announced this week comes from GrowthWorks and the government agency FedDev Ontario.
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