For any web-based small business or startup, there is a plethora of online real-time business data, such as page views, ad impressions, financial information, that need to be tracked frequently. TechCrunch50 startup Metricly, which launched at the Business Applications session, helps online businesses create easy-to-use dashboards to track their key metrics and better understand their business.

Metricly actually pulls in data from different sources, including financial systems, web analytics, social media and CRMs, and then provides dead- simple tools to create custom graphs and dashboards based on that data. So for example, users can see unique visitors, ad sales broken out by inventory, ad impression and CPMs, and more. Metricly will graph all this data, letting users easily see the ebbs and flows of this information and filter information.

What makes Metricly unique is the application’s ability to do some of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to combining and reading data. Metricly will combine multiple data sources together and compare and chart this information. Currently, Metrics lets you connect with existing data sources, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, and Intuit’s QuickBooks. QuickBooks users can sync their desktop files with Metricly’s cloud based platform automatically. You can also add custom metrics for your own data sources as well via the startup’s API.

Metricly is also designed to provide guidance to business owners on what data they should be looking for. So, Metricly suggest what metrics business owners should track and will provide summaries of each metric on a dedicated page. There are also community discussions on Metricly where users can compare what metrics they are using.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

KR: What are you tracking in terms of Twitter and Facebook?

A: We are following how many followers you have on Twitter, how many fans you ahve on your page.

TO: This strikes me as a dashboard for high-level metrics. How do you get down in the dirty details. This just pulls the display into lightweight dashboard. You still need to know what to track.

A: There are a lot of startups that don’t even know the basics in terms of metrics. We are really targeting a simple aggregation for high-level analytics. Certain businesses have precise metrics, you can share that with other people to help startups figure out what metrics they need.

SD: I worry that this will become a feature of a larger product. The products that actually generate data, generate graphs. So Google Analytics will replace this,

KD: For small businesses, they will only use one or two tools.

BH: What happens to data that I submit-is it anonymized?

A: It’s anonymous. We’re not storing the data, just doing some cacheing. One metric is useful to aggregate is revenue per user.

LZ: In the nonstartup world, what’s your pricing?

A: Still working on pricing. We’ll have a free version and then will have a paid version.

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Outside Coverage:
TC50: Metricly aggregates analytics for startups, small businesses VentureBeat.
Metricly: Aggregating Your Data To One Place #tc50 Techgeist.
Metricly – I disagree with the panelists – definitely need for correlated view @metricly #TC50 Cloud Profile.
Metricly – Realtime Dashboards for Business Go2Web20.