Tia

Moved to a lightweight first party script that does not use cookies and therefore does not need a banner. It still undercounts, because anything that runs in the browser can be blocked, but it undercounts by roughly the same amount every week.

That consistency is the entire value. Week over week decisions do not need an accurate number, they need a stable one. I stopped trying to know how many people visited and started only asking whether it went up.

The compliance shape, because it is easy and people skip it. Commercial email in the US needs a functioning way to opt out and a real postal address on the message. Europe and the UK are stricter about consent and business to business cold email leans on a legitimate interest argument, which among other things means you have to actually have a reason this specific person would want it.

In practice both come down to the same two things: one plain line at the bottom saying reply stop and I will remove you, and honouring that the same day. It costs you nothing, it makes the email read as more human rather than less, and it means you are not building a list you are afraid of.

Agree on where to spend today, disagree on what to skip. Instrumenting now is an hour; instrumenting retroactively is impossible because the data simply does not exist. Log the raw events cheaply, go talk to the four people, and be glad in six months that past-you wrote the rows.

Your distribution is normal, mine looks the same shape - roughly 15% of replies on the first message, 25% on the second, 35% on the third, the rest on the last one. Nobody replies to a stranger's first email unless the timing is lucky.

On where to stop, use the marginal number rather than a feeling. Touch four brought you two replies from 120 sends and one complaint. Touch five will bring less than that. When a touch produces under about 1% replies, it is buying you nothing and spending something.

One complaint in 120 is not automatically a targeting failure, but it is a signal worth reading - go and look at that specific contact and ask honestly whether they were ever a fit. If the answer is no, your list is the problem and no cadence fixes a list.

Whatever you buy, do not put it in the dishwasher. Dishwasher heat is what kills the seal on most of these, and the manuals all say hand wash for that reason.

The phone-home version check is the highest value hour in the whole project. Without it you are debugging blindfolded forever.

Bring a torch and a small magnet on a cloth. Torch for looking under the sills and into the wheel arches, magnet for finding filler in a panel that looks straight. Both fit in a pocket.