Keeping the Trains Running On Time — A Case Study in Data Capture

Right at the end of the process of preparing its first campaign codes through Claravine, Amtrak ran into a serious problem. The email pattern had been identified and selected with no issues, and the new codes and classifications followed suit. But when the landing page was entered for each of these email links, Claravine’s interface lit up with errors. The phone rang, and the users on the other end wanted to know what they’d done wrong.

Nothing — they’d done nothing wrong. Yet Claravine had detected that the codes still weren’t being captured. Diligent investigation uncovered a single JavaScript error on the landing page that, though unrelated to the core analytics implementation, had created a domino effect that stymied the Adobe Analytics data transmission entirely. No data sent meant no code could be captured.

What Two Weeks Would Have Cost

Had this campaign launched two weeks earlier — before Amtrak had transitioned to Claravine — those marketers would have captured absolutely no data about their campaign, despite having followed their inherited checklist with meticulous care. Once the page was repaired, the verification step ran again inside Claravine; every link passed cleanly.

Why the Save Mattered

Although this specific launch plan was temporarily derailed, the reporting data underneath it was worth saving. It always is. The ability to step back after any campaign and dispassionately judge its worth is the entire basis of experience optimization. But until tracking-code creation is fully automated, the time that should go toward analyzing which marketing efforts worked instead gets spent on whether they tracked at all.

It’s time to fully automate the tracking code process, so we can finally shift the conversation from what did or didn’t track, to what did or didn’t work.