Control Your Data - Control Your Destiny

Control Your Data - Control Your Destiny

Posted on December 13, 2016 nerdymind

It can be easy to overlook, but the content your website contains & the data it generates represents one of your most critical business assets. In this day and age, it's important to thoroughly vet partners, contractors, and companies that are offering digital services to make sure that you the client will always retain ownership of your digital assets. When relationships among the members of your digital team change (because they most certainly will) you can easily make sure that these transitions don't cause the loss of years of historical data, important business records, domain names, or worse.

At NerdyMind, we believe that a company should stand by the work it does and the results that it generates. We also believe that digital partners like marketing agencies should be ready to educate and enable clients to easily make the right decisions that will protect their data. We strive to never be the type of agency that drafts dubious contracts, locking clients out of data, accounts, and digital properties that they've paid for and should own, and do so in a way that leave their former clients with no data, and no real legal recourse. Some of the tactics we've seen out there border on extortion of clients who want to sever their relationship with the offending agency; this leaves startup businesses to either pay the extortion fees to gain access to their website content, domain name, and data, or all the way back at the drawing board to start over again.

Because of our client ownership philosophy, we have created a cheat sheet for regret-free online management that you can use as a guideline when selecting digital marketing partners:

The Nerdy Guide to Regret-Free Site Ownership
Always make sure you (or your company) own the following:
  1. Domain Name(s)
  2. Hosting Account(s)
  3. Email Account(s)
  4. Analytics Account(s)
    1. Google analytics, statcounter, and any other account where you can access historical traffic data; even if you don't ever use this data, you definitely should own this data. If you don't use it now, you or a future partner of yours will!
  5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing Account(s)
    1. You should own any account you are spending money to advertise on. Never give someone your money, then let them obfuscate the management AND reporting. If they are buying Google AdWords ads on your behalf, make sure you have direct access to the metrics, and can take over the account if needed.
  6. Affiliate Program Account(s)
    1. Same as with PPC, Affiliate programs can represent a significant monetary and time investment. There's absolutely no scenario where you should not own this too.

In all cases, we recommend only working with partners who agree to establish or keep you as the primary account administrator, whatever the service.