Back in the days before Google Analytics hundreds of thousands of sites relied on WebSideStory‘s Hitbox service for visitor stats. If you surfed the web in the late 90s you probably saw a lot of homepages with Hitbox’s graphics in their footers. Maybe you even had one on your Geocites page.
Hitbox was eventually M&Aed out of existence, but WebSideStory co-founder Blaise Barrelet and few other alumni have spent the past few years working on Anametrix, an analytics startup that just announced a $4.4 million series A led by TVC Capital.
Anametrix was founded in 2009 and in 2010 it acquired Nordic Research Corporation, an analytics company founded by former WebSideStory system architect Anders Olsson. Olsson is now CTO of Anametrix and is considered a co-founder. Other WebSideStory alum at Anametrix include chief marketing officer Pelin Thorogood and general counsel/VP of corporate development Michael Christian.
So why yet another analytics company? Anametrix’s play is to help unify disparate analytics services into a single platform. “We’re not here to replace other data sources like Omniture or Radian6,” Thorogood says. Instead, the company’s service can integrate with other other analytics systems of various types, including web analytics, social media analytics and data from e-mail and search engine marketing campaigns.
The idea is not just to give users a single pane of glass to look at their analytics, but to mash up all the data to find trends and relationships that might not otherwise be visible — and to give its customers insight into how well different marketing campaigns are performing.
Anametrix can integrate with many existing solutions out of the box. It also has an API and a connector for the R programming language.
Thorogood explains that although Anametrix provides a software-as-a-service, up until now the company has had to do a large amount of customization for each customer. That’s why today it’s introducing Campaign Analytics, a self-service product running on top of the existing Anametrix platform that will help customers get up and running without having to rely on professional services.
Back in 2000 Barrelet admitted to Inc. in 2000 that he “didn’t even know that there were venture-capital firms” when Hitbox launched in 1996. That’s obviously not a problem for Barrelet anymore. Previous to today’s round the company raised raised $2.3 million from early stage investors, including Analytics Ventures, Airtek Capital Group, WMAS Management Group and Alain Schreiber.