When collecting data for Messaging, our page tracking software is built to screenshot homepage & category landing page updates if it has seen a change of more than 10%. These trackers are also able to click through any popups and cookies that may get in the way of the actual site content.
Our data team subscribes to all email updates available on each website - including all genders and categories. We are unable to subscribe to personalized emails that are based on purchase history or customer demographics, as this would require us to make purchases on the website and have access to proprietary customer data. This can mean you may have received an email from a retailer to your personal email that isn’t necessarily captured in EDITED. We sometimes also find that retailers themselves unsubscribe us from their mailing lists, due to our trackers not being a customer that is interacting with their emails/content.
All of the text from both images and text itself within these channels is extracted from the screenshots by optical character recognition software. This is reliant on how the text is presented. For instance, we cannot extract text in a moving image/gif/video/carousel content, but can pick up any static text.
As these captures are in screenshot format, all words will be captured in the native language of the site and not translated to English. This means the updates cannot be translated to English. Therefore, it is often helpful to include both the native language and English translation in keyword searches in case non-english sites include both.
If you spot a screenshot not formatting as you’d expect, or think there is a genuine publicly facing update that is missing from a retailers updates, please reach out to Support and our team will be happy to investigate this further!