Sometrics Raises $4 Million For Social Analytics And Advertising Platform

LA-based Sometrics has secured a Series B round of venture capital, led by Walt Disney Company-affiliated Steamboat Ventures and joined by previous investors The Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners. In total, $4 million was injected into the fledgling company, we’ve learned.

That brings the total invested in the startup to $5.55 million. The first round was raised back in May 2008. It was the first investment made by The Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners and Venrock.

Sometrics is one of many companies looking to optimize the way social networks, gaming platforms and virtual worlds are being monetized. The startup markets tools that allow publishers and brands to manage ad inventory across social web platforms, optimize campaigns through audience analysis and targeting, as well as gain ‘social intelligence’ about the performance of those campaigns through detailed analytics.

The latter part is what the company started out with, by giving social app developers a way get an overview of the number of page views and unique visits, installs and uninstalls, age of users, gender of users, number of friends, location of users and more for their Facebook and MySpace apps.

The company has since diversified and broadened its offering, and now does a little bit of everything that publishers and advertisers can tap into to get more ROI from advertising campaigns on social gaming sites, community sites and from sales of virtual goods across the board. Sometrics appear to be gravitating towards a focus on game developers, particularly with their Virtual Currency Manager product. The startup already boasts a number of partnerships with players in the online gaming industry, such as Playdom and Outspark.

Virtual goods and social advertising are an interesting field that’s poised for growth, but there’s a lot of competition in the space, with companies like SocialMedia.com and OfferPal Media offering services similar to what Sometrics markets. Maybe the pedigree of co-founder and CEO of Sometrics, Ian Swanson, can help the company stand out among them; Swanson used to run business development for AOL-owned Userplane and was an executive at Sprint before that.