Compliance & Marketing

A website or CMS never stands on its own, but a tool for marketing that exists in and interacts with an entire ecosystem of tools. Some of these are so large they’ve become a standard on their own. Increasingly, as the internet matures, regulations come in to play that everyone that operates in this space has to deal with in one way or another.

Search-Engine-Optimisation is everything that goes into making websites appear well on search engines. It’s an entire topic in its own and we’ll only scratch the surface here. Many other topics like hosting, performance and accessibility play a large role here as well.

Things we do to make our websites perform well in this area include, but are not limited to, the following.

Most of those things are taken care of by the platform automatically so they’re no longer things you have to actively worry about.

While it’s in some cases recommended to allow pagination to be indexed (ie. have page 2, 3, etc appear as separate results in search engines), we don’t do that. Contrary to normal webshop with products, events are date-based. So every day what’s on page 1 or page 2 changes. We do allow crawlers to go to those pages to find and index what’s there, but we don’t “self-canonicalize” those pages. This prevents them from competing with each other, and directs all traffic to the first page of the what’s-on overview.

Search-Engine-Advertising is the field of advertising on search engines (mostly Google). Re-marketing is the activity of “engaging audiences who have already interacted with your brand” (source). Both involve using (targeted) advertising to bring visitors back to your website. While we don’t actively provide these services to our clients, our platform provides various features to make doing advertising easily in both Google and Meta (Facebook).

Our feeds for Google and Facebook include events that re-marketing was enabled for. For those events their appearance (title and description) can also be tweaked for each service, since both have different requirements as to the length of those fields. We even help you there by automatically counting the number of characters while you type.

The aforementioned metadata also helps our websites appear professionally on social media. We ensure images have the correct dimensions, that links are fully compatible with alls services, and we even have extensive processing of content that ensures every page has an optimal description that follows best practices.

If you want to automate even more and use advanced tools to share content on social media, we have an Events Feed that you can, for instance, feed into services like Channable to generate posts.

Google Tagmanager (GTM) is the industry standard for dynamically adding tags to your website to track user acquisition, behaviour and the performance of your marketing activities. The dataLayer is the primary mode of communication between our websites and GTM, and it is very rich in information that can be used to trigger the right tags and pixels to be loaded for each situation.

Additionally, if you use our mailings module, each mailing comes with specific UTM campaign values, even down to individual elements like images and buttons, to help you track and compare their performance.

It’s even possible to add custom scripts via the CMS Control Panel, which is useful for domain verification and various other use cases. And server-side tracking is also fully integrated and can be set up together with our marketing partners.

Our platform is mostly agnostic as to the service used to measure visitor behaviour on our websites, but of course Google Analytics is the market leader by far. The dataLayer provides a ton of detail on the user, their position in their journey, the tickets they’re buying, and more. All of this data can feed into an analytics server to get extremely fine-grained detail on your marketing performance.

As the internet has become more mature, and individuals and governments alike have become more aware of how much of our own personal information has become online and distributed across untold dozens of websites, an increasing number of safeguards have come into place. To comply with standards like GDPR, and general expectations from users, we’re on the forefront of keeping user data secure. We have broad solutions for anonymization as well as more specific solutions for the “right to be forgotten”.

Furthermore we’re careful that all our data is hosted in the EU with partners that are certified according to ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and NEN 7510, ensuring the state of the art in information security.

Cookies are a blanket label that covers several technologies, including cookies themselves. Because cookies can be used to identify users, it’s important they have control over how that happens. More importantly, via “cookie banners” users nowadays have a say in how much data about their activity, and any personally identifiable data is collected. As a “first party”, the site the user is actively visiting and doing a transaction on, you’re allowed to have access to more than “third parties” should have that the user does not have an active relationship with. This means that any services used for analytics and other marketing tools, but also embedded media and even chat boxes typically collect data and your visitors should have a say about that.

In the Peppered platform you’re welcome to use any cookie management solution you like. However, the platform comes with a simple and easy to use cookie banner. It is regularly updated to stay compliant with EU regulations, user-friendly, and easily integrated into the consent settings of for instance Google Tagmanager. Additionally, being integrated into the platform completely, it also helps with third party content in embedded content and iFrames.

To make data available for use by third parties we provide various feeds. These can be fed into other tools your using for marketing and advertising. And they can also be made available to others, for instance to build apps or other use cases we haven’t even thought of yet.

We prefer to leave support around using most marketing tools to parties with extensive experience with those specific tools. This field is so broad it’s impossible for us to know everything there is to know about it. Our USP is collecting data from various sources and enabling the use of that data in whatever the best tool is for any specific use case. We actively partner with providers of Analytics and other services, and they give use feedback on topics like metadata and accessibility to inform future platform developments. At the same time we do keep up with rules and regulations to ensure we’re compliant and on top of any changes there.