Start-up veteran Ardagh is back with Facebook API Trackalyse

15 Feb 2012

Telecoms and media entrepreneur Charlie Ardagh is back in the game with a new Facebook API that enables Facebook fan page administrators to gain access to statistics on the growth, activity and engagement levels of the fans of their pages and plot them against competitors’ data.

Based in the National College of Ireland Business Incubation Centre, Trackalyse.com aims to develop future iterations aimed at Twitter and other social networks. The company is an Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start Up, and its shareholders include Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors.

Ardagh previously co-founded a number of telecoms and media companies over the last 13 years, including internet service provider Leap Broadband, which Magnet Networks later acquired.

The API, which was launched at the Measurement.ie online marketing conference, enables Facebook fan page administrators to gain access to statistics on the growth, activity and engagement levels of the fans of their pages and plot them against the same data for their competitor pages.

“Facebook is the No 1 social network and the right place for us to start,” Ardagh explained. “Businesses and organisations that use Facebook as one of the main touchpoints for their brand can only truly know how good a job they are doing if they can benchmark their results against their competitors. That is what we enable with this new service.”

‘As easy to use as Facebook itself’

Ardagh said the API is designed to be as easy to use as Facebook itself.

“Many of the traditional analytics services require the user to have a degree in statistics; we decided that that was unreasonable to assume and so we made a service that anybody could use. Signing up for the free version takes seconds so there are no barriers to people who want to try this out,” Ardagh explained.

Trackalyse can track any of the millions of fan pages on Facebook, and is already tracking thousands of the leading pages in Ireland and the UK.

“We have already signed over 100 companies to our Beta service, as well as some of the leading ad agencies, and it is our hope to have thousands of businesses from all over the world sign up over the months and years ahead,” Ardagh explained.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com