Today on the tradeshow floor at SXSW, I met with several companies that were doing some interesting things with metrics and analyzing engagement. As marketers we can’t just focus our attention on hits and conversions. We need to be able to gather intelligence about the specific channels and tactics that work in a given campaign, and which ones don’t.

I met with a company called Lytiks out of Boston. They’ve built a system with a simple dashboard that tracks actions, engagement, time spent on site etc. Now, in some ways it’s similar to Google Analytics. But where Lytiks really shines is the integration of call tracking into their system. The example David Jenkens, CEO of Lytiks, gave to me was that of a local plumber. Let’s say a plumber places the same phone number in yellowpages.com, their local paper and sets up a campaign using Google AdWords. How do I know which marketing channel is performing the best? What is the best ROI? In Lytiks you can create a separate phone number from inide the platform. Choose an 800 number or a local area code and place each unique number in it’s own channel. Then at the end of each month you can clearly see which channel has worked the best.

There’s also a slew of other ways to track social campaigns on Twitter and Facebook and a host of other media spaces.

Another company I talked today is called WhoLinksToMe. WLTM specializes in analysing reputation and SERP rankings through inbound links. We know that inbound links are one of the most important factors to great SEO, but the quality of those links matter too. Who is linking to you? Who isn’t? The service can also tell you who is linking to your competition, but NOT to you.

In addition to the number of links and who they are, WLTM also breaks down inbound links geographically by country so you can how far your brand extends.

These types of services appeal to me as a marketer. I’m always looking for better ways to track how well our message is reaching those on Twitter vs. Facebook vs. YouTube. Does it make more sense to write for Adotas or our own blog? Which AdWords campaigns are bringing me the most leads? Lytiks and WhoLinksToMe can answer many of those questions.

Are you at SXSW? What companies or services have you seen that can help us more intelligently track our metrics?