New York-based SumAll, who BetaKit covered in September when it launched its SumAll Traffic analytics dashboard, announced today the launch of its new analytics tool for Instagram. Given that mobile traffic on Instagram jumped up 724 percent over a six-month period ending in August 2012, the photo sharing platform has seen 54 percent of top brands jump on board, which leaves little doubt as to the need of a set of tools to measure engagement, and what SumAll focuses on: showing how activity on a social platform translates into sales.
“It [Instagram] is definitely a source of data that’s really under-explored, and for a surprising number of merchants and businesses, it’s a real driver of business, and I don’t think many of them have ticked the dots and seen that information put together,” CEO Dane Atkinson said in an interview. “It’s also surprising to see that the engagement around Instagram users is way higher, 10 times more than what the engagement is around Facebook and Twitter just from comments, ‘like’ ratios, re-commenting point of view, people on Instagram are very loyal.”
The company’s goal has always been to enable SMBs to take advantage of their own data stored in multiple services and bring it all together on a dashboard that puts the emphasis on correlating activity on the web, be it social media or online advertising, with sales data. SumAll’s platform integrates with online shopping partners eBay, PayPal, Shopify, and Magento, in addition to gathering social data from Twitter, Facebook, and website data from Google Analytics. All of which results in an effort to distill the dollar value of a website visit, Facebook ‘like’, or Twitter retweet, and now activity on Instagram, where it will analyze variables like ‘likes,’ comments, and sharing of photos.
“It has a much more per user/per like/per customer value equation than any other service. We usually find a visit being worth a little over a$1, a ‘like’ being worth a little less, but every time we do a correlation to Instagram, it’s worth at least $4-5,” Atkinson added.
SumAll continues to offer its services for free and has 15,000 users across the globe, processing and analyzing billions of dollars worth of transactions according to Atkinson. It will look to implement a premium account down the road which would give users the ability to dive deeper into the data as the existing feature set is geared more towards providing only a big picture view for online merchants.
There has been a lot of activity around helping brands and merchants take advantage of Instagram, from other analytics and insights providers like Statigram and Simply Measured. Other players including campaign manager VenueSeen, and image recognition and matching technology developed by gazeMetrix, a 500 Startups company, which processes Instagram photos to identify a brand’s logo and provides them in a dashboard for businesses to boost engagement. SumAll has no plans to go down the campaign management route as of right now.
It is also in talks with social heavyweight Pinterest, and will continue on its road to integrate with as many third-party APIs as possible to provide its users with an all-in-one analytics platform. It’s going to be rolling out additional features that will allow customers to be able to conduct projections from their datasets to predict sales. It has also recently integrated with a group of mobile payment processing providers like Stripe, and will look to be the ‘analytics for everyone’ choice for SMBs and ecommerce startups.