Marketers can access more internal data than ever before thanks to high-powered software like Google Analytics. But having that information at your fingertips serves a limited purpose — getting actionable insights from data is what can really help companies make better business decisions.
MetricStory wants to make that process more efficient with machine learning and algorithms. The Seattle-based startup today raised a $1.45 million seed round led by Elementum Ventures, with participation from Geekdom Fund, Wisemont Capital, Alliance of Angels, and individual investors like Rudy Gadre and Geoff Entress.
The company was founded by Joshua Gebhardt and Brandon Nutter, both who previously worked at Seattle-based Analytics Pros. While there, the two founders helped clients like Yelp and Expedia get the most out of their Google Analytics data.
But they noticed a few problems. Clients often times did not understand how to fully utilize the analytics platform, and the data was becoming siloed across engineers, analysts, marketers, third-party consultants, and more.
“With MetricStory, we wanted to eliminate the need for having to go to different people for information, as well as having to learn a difficult, complex platform,” Gebhardt said.
Using machine learning and algorithms, the startup has built technology that takes web analytics and spits out actionable insights immediately, depending on what the user wants to find out.
“We automatically mine analytics at a scale that no human being could do,” Gebhardt noted.
MetricStory produces automatically-generated reports in plain English from Google Analytics data — the company will support other platforms like Omniture, Marketo, Salesforce, Optimizely later on — based on specific questions a user may have, and offers up recommendations for where attention should be placed. Gebhardt said the software is intuitive enough so that anyone in a given company — not just analytics experts or engineers — can use MetricStory to interpret data.
Early customers of MetricStory include FloSports and Frontier Airlines, who noted that the platform will “be the foundation for our marketing” next year. The two-person company is a graduate of Techstars Austin and works out of Galvanize in Seattle.
