Unified, which has created what it calls a “social operating platform,” is announcing that it has acquired analytics startup Awe.sm.
Unified offers tools for buying ads on social media, and for monitoring other ad-buying systems. Earlier this year it added business intelligence data for tracking broader trends in a companies’ social ad spending.
Awe.sm, meanwhile, started out as a tool for developers to track social sharing (even if you’ve never used the product, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Awe.sm-shortened links), but its focus has shifted to advertisers.
Unified said that by integrating Awe.sm’s technology, it will be able to offer more detailed data about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, particularly outside of social media. For example, a spokesperson told me that Unified already offered action tracking and return-on-investment measurements on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (on both mobile and social), but with the acquisition it can add similar data for all digital advertising, including search and display, as well as offline.
Thanks to the acquisition, Unified will also be able to offer an open API framework that can be used by partners and developers, the spokesperson said.
“Integrating awe.sm’s social attribution technology with Unified’s system of record enables us to give marketers unprecedented insights into the value that social sharing brings to their business,” said Unified co-founder and CEO Sheldon Owen in the acquisition release.
Five members of the Awe.sm team will be joining the Unified offices in New York and San Francisco, bringing the company’s total headcount to more than 90. Unified said that Awe.sm customers should not experience any service interruption, and that the combined company will be launching new products using Awe.sm technology in the coming months.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Awe.sm had raised $5.3 million from Upfront Ventures, Foundry Group, and others.
Unified acquired Facebook analytics company PageLever last year.
Update: This Unified blog post offers a little more detail, including on the API front:
Unified is also now providing an open API platform which allows us to provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their paid and owned media data along with cross-channel social measurement as an infrastructure as a service. This will enable brands, agencies, technology vendors, media publishers, content producers, and influencers the ability to build multi-generational social measurement into the foundation of their offerings.
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