Visually Will Tell Marketers Whether People Actually Cared About That Infographic

Infographic and “visual content” marketplace Visually is the latest startup trying to take a new approach to measuring the effectiveness of content marketing.

In the past month or so I’ve written about new analytics tools offered by Contently, Chartbeat, and Sharethrough, all based on the idea that content marketers and native advertisers need new sets of data to tell whether their efforts and money are actually paying off.

When I brought up those other companies, co-founder and CEO Stew Langille said Visually is taking a different approach with its new Native Analytics product. It will allow customers to look at how the full campaign or website is doing, but it’s really focused on revealing details about individual pieces of content, regardless of where they get published.

After all, a successful infographic won’t just show up on your website, but will also get published on other blogs and shared on Facebook and Twitter. Visually says it can track that content when it’s embedded on other sites, and also use OCR image tracking to identify other locations where the infographic has been posted. Visually can then tell customers how many times that piece of content has been viewed and shared and use third-party data to break down the people viewing the content into groups like “technophiles,” “movie lovers” and “shutterbugs.”

[Update: I asked Visually for a full list of all the data that it will provide, and this is what I got back — pageviews (on-site and off-site using embed code), social shares (on-site and off-site, no embed code required), top tweeters, press and blog pickups, social media referrals, viewer affinity group, viewer “in-market” intent, viewer demographics, average time spent viewing and total time spent viewing]

The new analytics tools are part of the larger launch of a product called Visually Campaigns. In addition to the company’s previous focus on providing a marketplace and tools for creating infographics, videos, and interactive graphics, Visually Campaigns also allows teams to plan their broader campaigns. Combined with the launch of Native Analytics, Langille said Visually now covers “the whole life cycle” of content marketing — with the exception of distribution, i.e. promoting the content and making sure it gets seen. (And Langille suggested his team will be getting to distribution eventually.)

At the beginning of this year, Visually announced that it had raised $8.1 million in Series A funding.