Meet Our Little Social Analytics App - Funneld
This internet app story is going to be a little different. We're going to be covering our own little analytics app called Funneld that we've been working on behind the curtains this autumn. The origins of this app go back to problem we've had with understanding visitors coming to ArcticStartup. A lot of our readers come to the site from Twitter and Facebook for example, but the currently available tools fail to show us which stories are the ones that attract visitors. So, we went about and created a little app for that. In doing so, we realised that others might have the same problem and we decided to set it up as an app of its own and develop it like any other startup out there works on a product or a service of theirs.
We're still at a very early stage with the app, but we wanted to give a little shout out about it. We're currently recruiting interested beta users through the site. So if you're interested in understanding how social networks generate traffic to your site, feel free to signup for an invitation. Be sure to add a little explanation of what you'd like to measure as this will help us in choosing the first users. As we're still in our very early stages with the app itself, we're coming out with Facebook integration at first. However, we will be adding other sites as soon as possible.
In our run up to developing this service, we talked to numerous people how they see social networks in generating traffic and also to understand if others share the problem. Social networks in general have become major sources of traffic for many sites, thanks to the Like and Tweet -buttons out there. However, current web analytics tools aren't built in a manner to help you understand the traffic on more specific level and this is exactly the problem we wanted to solve.
We'll be continuing development on the app over the coming months, but since we're working on other things as well it probably won't be as fast as we'd like it to be - so patience is appreciated. However, we do want to make this a working, valuable app of its own and intend to push it forward heavily during 2011.
The development of the app has been done by the magnificent team at Kisko Labs. With the development of this app, I'm proud to announce that Kisko Labs is now also a minority partner in ArcticStartup. We really want to keep professional and smart people close to us, so the decision to do so was relatively easy.
Funneld being a project of ArcticStartup, we won't be overly publicizing it in ArcticStartup - not to worry. We'll give it the same space it deserves among the other apps and companies out there. In the future as things progress, you'll be able to follow the development on the Funneld site.
Oh, and most importantly - we'll begin distributing some invitations to the service next week. If you don't get one immediately, not to worry - we're still at a very early stage and once we get the glitches sorted out, we'll be opening the doors to the public. So sign-up for an invitation, if you're interested in understanding your social media visibility and traffic better.
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Interesting. Would you elaborate how you will differentiate funneld from other existing social analytics services (such as Kontagent)?
Dubious Entrepreneur, thanks for the question.
I'd say Funneld differs quite dramatically from Kontagent. While Kontagent is all about understanding in-application analytics better, we're more about looking at social media sites out there from the view point of a site owner.
Example; Funneld helps us in understanding our traffic (ArcticStartup.com) we receive from Facebook in a dramatically better way than traditional analytics services out there.
But like I mentioned in the post, we're still in our relatively early steps with the product. However, we do have our visions where we want to take it though :)
There indeed is a great demand on tools helping us to understand the visitors and/or buyers visiting the website through social media.
I was ready to slash my wrists at a Frosmo demo (the solution itself sounds very much like this app, but is already quite an intelligent and well developed tool) until it came to the point of a real demo showing full demographics of visitors/buyers from an actual webstore with full contact details and analysis on the best segments.
All in all this is what website owners need - someone making some sense and usable information out of social media. Keep up the good work!
Thanks Matti for the comments.
We did check out Frosmo as well. In our view it falls into the same category as Kontagent with a little bit more emphasis on the site perhaps. Both are fabulous services in what they do, but fail to show in my opinion what we've come up with our (very) simple app at the moment.
There's a lot of room here for innovation to better understand business and the effect of social media on that.