“Track Everything” Isn’t Just For Advertising

I recently had a client who had a very big product launch. In fact, it was so big that the servers couldn’t keep up!

Consequently, there were many people who “signed up” for his service but never received the “activation” email. And inside the activation email was a link that activated the customer’s account.

Fortunately, my client’s software logged the email address for every “signup” AND for every “confirmation”. So all he had to do was extract the emails from the “signup” list that were NOT in the “activated” list, and re-send the activation link to those people.

This is a perfect illustration of the necessity of logging data for every stage of your process. Any time someone fills out a form or takes an action of any kind, you should be keeping a record of it.

If you have a privacy policy, make sure its verbage takes this into account.

Speaking of Privacy Policies, it’s sometimes interesting to see what a merchant’s machine readable “compact” privacy policy is saying. I created a little tool that translates the machine-readable code to human-readable format — you can plug in your website of interest and see what they’re policy is. Just click the link below to open this tool in a new window:

Analyze A Site’s “Compact” Privacy Policy

Now do me a favor — let me know what questions you may have about internet marketing technology in general — just leave a comment or click on the contact form link on the right side of this page.

Thanks!

Paul