Top tip: keep an incident log
Let’s start with an (obvious) statement: technical problems happen in our marketing teams from time to time.
(Effective monitoring of your key processes is super important, but that’s a topic for another post!)
Whenever you encounter a technical problem which affects your marketing, you should investigate the causes to prevent the same thing from happening again. You will also want to analyse the effects that the problem has had on your marketing activities.
For example:
- Did any campaigns fail to send?
- Were any assets (e.g. landing pages) unavailable?
- Was tracking/attribution interrupted?
Of course, uncovering these consequences just after the technical issues is vital. However, once your immediate post mortem is done, it’s easy to lose track of the original problem. You may find yourself in a few months time, trying to explain an unexpected drop in your KPIs, having forgotten all about it.
Keeping an incident log will help you avoid this confusion.
How to build your incident log
In its simplest form, your incidence log can just be a list of technical issues that have come up along with the date it was logged. It’s best to add a bit more detail though, to help you and your colleagues with any future investigations.
Some things you might include:
- Date the issue was solved
- The current status
- A detailed description of what happened
- The affected channels and what impact there was
- How was the issue solved
The next question: where to keep your incident log?
The key thing here is somewhere that’s easily accessible for everyone in the team. Slack or other messaging tools are not ideal, as the messages tend to get buried over time. The best places are things like your company documentation tool (e.g. Confluence) or some other shared workspace. Work management platforms like Asana are also suitable.
Summing up
Even though keeping an incident log can require some discipline, doing so will ultimately save you time down the line – when analysing your marketing efforts and explaining any unexpected dips in performance.
Have fun!
