Anametrix nabs $4 million to bring predictive analytics to marketers

For marketers, it’s not always easy to prove return on investment (ROI), particularly for their social media campaigns.

Anametrix is one of a growing number of startups that provide “big data” analytics tools to marketers. Today, the San Diego-based company has raised $4.4m from TVC Capital in its first round of venture funding.

Anametrix says it wants to help CMOs and lower-level marketing professionals increase their ROI, and better-target their email and social media outreach. The technology collects data from any source such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or community forums, which is analyzed and visually displayed. The idea is that with a better understanding of the data, marketers can uncover new revenue opportunities.

The company was founded in 2010 by WebSideStory’s analytics team. In 2008, WebSideStory was acquired by Omniture for $394 million.

For startups like Anametrix, there is a huge market opportunity. However, to succeed they will need to displace companies like Tableau that provide data visualization tools for marketers, and Salesforce, which recently unveiled its software suite, Marketing Cloud.

A recent study from Gartner, a research firm, shows that marketers will spend more money on IT than CIOs by 2017.

“Our Series A funding enables us to scale sales and marketing efforts to exploit the increasing market demand for digital analytics and to fuel product innovation, particularly in next-generation predictive analysis for marketers,” the company’s CEO, Blaise Barrelet, told me.

With this funding round, Steve Hamerslag of San Diego-based TVC Capital, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

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