Social media analytics startup Campalyst is celebrating its first birthday today, and its big present is a new seed round (of undisclosed size) from Amsterdam-based venture capital firm HENQ.
The company was co-founded by former business school classmates Jevgenijs Kazanins and Dalia Lasaite, plus Estonian developers Juhan Aasaru and Sander Muru, as part of Garage48, a European boot camp where startups are created in the course of a weekend. During last year’s beta testing period, Kazanins says more than 250 marketing agencies and brands signed up to use the product. Campalyst closed the beta period in January and started converting those sign-ups into paying customers.
“Campalyst differs from other vendors in the social analytics space by focusing on measuring and maximizing monetary ROI, i.e. sales and conversions generated via social media,” Kazanins says. “While most vendors measure fan count and engagement, Campalyst takes an extra step and measures whether engagement on brands’ Facebook and Twitter properties results in online sales on their websites.”
That seems to be a big theme this year — or heck, this month. Google and Adobe both announced new analytics features recently for measuring the ROI of social media.
Campalyst measures the conversion funnel starting with a Facebook or Twitter update and ending with a sale on a website, Kazanins says. It provides granular analytics looking at the results of each individual tweet, update, or Facebook Ad. And it also looks at the sales and conversion data for individual Twitter accounts.
As part of the announcement, Campalyst announced that it’s starting the private beta test of its integration with Facebook Ads. In the future, Kazanins says he wants to add support for more social networks (including YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+) and more paid advertising formats (it currently supports Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories, and Kazanins is also looking at YouTube Promoted Videos and Twitter Promoted Tweets).
HENQ partner Coen van Duiven is joining Campalyst’s board of directors.