Simply Measured announced their latest integration earlier this week:

Why Is This a Big Deal?

Sure, this isn’t the first time that solutions are merging or integrating with each other. To understand why this is such a big deal, we need to understand why such a move makes so much sense.

Simply Measured are a digital analytics powerhouse, a leader in social analytics across owned, earned and paid social media (paid being a fairly recent addition to the platform), with integration with web analytics (via Google Analytics).

SHIFT, on the other hand, is the leading cross-network social advertising platform for brands and agencies. SHIFT’s forte is their unique partnership with Facebook’s Atlas, an ad-serving and measurement company that focuses on cross-device and cross-platfom advertising. At time of writing, SHIFT is only one of three social advertising solutions that partner with Atlas, making them pretty unique.

With both solutions being leaders in the digital marketing space, it only makes sense for them to integrate with each other to help people adopt a holistic approach to digital analytics. With in-depth social and web analytics on one side, and in-depth ad analytics on the other, you’ll start having a 360° view of how you’re performing across platforms when you merge these two together. You can run optimised multi-channel campaigns and see how they’re performing in one place; you can see how your social ads are contributing to your site traffic in one place, and so much more. This doesn’t mean more data to work with – it’s the same data you’d get from multiple sources, except in one platform, and with a better context. Same data + better approach = better insights.

This is a sign of a shift in the market for digital marketing software: in the same ways that more and more brands are embracing the omni channel approach, so are solutions – specialist tools are branching out, embracing other areas of digital marketing, while others are bundling up, becoming a hub of analytics. A bit like Simply Measured – from providing analytics for so many social networks, they also provide an integration with web analytics, and you can now have a view of social ads and their performance in one platform. The more dots you connect, the better your results, and the more you get in one analytics platform, the less time you have to spend joining the dots yourself.

This shift, however, is not new: Socialbakers were one of the very first solutions to provide ad analytics in their analytics suite a year ago (with a recent makeover to make their analytics, publishing and campaign solution bigger and better).

While Socialbakers and Simply Measured aren’t the first (and definitely won’t be the last) at taking this holistic approach to digital analytics, it clearly shows that solutions are gradually starting to “practice what they preach” – if you’re advised to adopt a multi-channel approach, there’s no reason why the tool you’re relying on shouldn’t do the same.

You can read more about the Shift + Simply Measured integration on the Shift blog and on the Simply Measured blog.