Source Codes: A String of Characters for Every Small Piece (of Marketing Data)

Since its earliest emergence, the Internet's byword has been interoperability.

"The Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets," David Weinberger mused in his seminal 2003 study Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

Weinberger was reflecting on the still-novel capacity of hyperlinked conversations to shatter the centralized, authoritative voice. But it applies no less to campaigners tending the ecology of an ever more complex digital presence, whose small nuggets are tweets, memes, and micro-targeted ads, a panful of gravel with a few flecks of gold that'll wash right away if we're not spry enough to see them.

We live amid the smallest of pieces. What we need is the loosest of joiners.

Because it's clear at this point that the price paid for "tight" joiners – joins attributing results to asks – is prohibitive. Vendor lock-in to integrated CRMs who can still only track the performance of their own emails linked to their own pages. Ever-less reliable pixel tracking just to see dubious ad stats on a platform everyone is deserting.

The "loose" answer, the answer that joins, that scales, that multiplies, is the oldest and simplest answer, the original Montgomery Ward catalog answer: the source code.

That's Frakture's answer, too.

A string of unique characters for every outbound link, registered by any inbound point of action: a loosey-goosey universal language for every small piece. 

Texted a link to your urgent congressional action page? Tweeted an event registration? Sent ad clickers, YouTubers, email subscribers, all to your main donation page? Source coding sorts it all out.

The high price that source code-based tracking would have once exacted is – was – the grind of post-processing and cross-referencing, to manually match up codes to origin points and spin up spreadsheets that fall out of date before their formulae compile. Thanks to automation, this is the one attribution cost that's falling rather than rising the more the channels multiply: Frakture's bots elegantly shoulder that once-tedious burden on your behalf, loading records by the millions, extracting and analyzing source codes, generating near-instant reports that illuminate which small nuggets are specks of gold.

Whether - like us - you’re pining for the internet of the early aughts or just struggling to make sense out of some messy marketing data, we’d love to help. 

Drop us a line and let’s chat.