While at an Advertising Week event on Thursday, Tumblr gave marketers a gift they'd long been hoping for in the form of a full analytics dashboard. Access to such a service gives marketers a wide new range of powers and capabilities to put Tumblr to work as an advertising platform, which is handy, given that Tumblr is starting to push its own value as an advertising platform.

Specifically, the Tumblr blogging network named Union Metrics as a "preferred" third-party for providing analytics, which gives marketers access to a wide variety of informative topics in the vein of just what's happening on Tumblr at any given time. For instance, marketers will be able to track popular content, as well as popular blogs and topics within those blogs. They will be able to track engagement levels, follow trends in the making, and determine just how much influence individual bloggers and curators wield on Tumblr.

This is a pretty significant step up, as previously; Union Metrics was focusing on Twitter (News - Alert) analytics with TweetReach, regarded by many to be its flagship product. But there's still something of a down side in all this as the Union Metrics service will reportedly be available by invitation only until November.


Image via www.tumblr.com

Naturally, many are regarding this as a great step for Tumblr to take, especially in light of Tumblr's recent promotion as an advertising platform by way of its "pinned posts" offering back in June that allowed users to pin posts to the tops of their followers' dashboards for 24 hours. A good idea, but one that many marketers likely didn't want to engage in without having some extra information about just what they were paying for the opportunity to pin up. With the analytics service in place, Tumblr will likely get quite a bit more paying traffic in the mix as marketers look to set up shop in heavily-trafficked positions.

Marketers need to know just what it is they're paying for when it comes to advertising; indeed, marketing to marketers is no different from marketing to anyone else in the respect that added value is the proposition that so often wins the day any more. Giving marketers access to the necessary information to let them determine just where their marketing dollars are best spent is a proposition that will likely pay substantial dividends for Tumblr, and give marketers a whole lot more force in the Tumblr arena.

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