Hi all,
Thank you both for your feedback and your patience as I followed up on this with the Product Team.
Decisions like this aren’t easy, so I wanted to provide some additional context on what went into the change.
First, a quick summary: last week, the recent activities feature, which shows pages viewed by anonymous visitors in the Prospects tool, was removed. Prospects still shows aggregated analytics about companies, and you can still view the individual pages that your known contacts have viewed from the contact record.
A lot of factors go into a decision like this, but here are a few that were high on the list:
- User feedback. Over time, the feedback on this feature has been mixed at best. While that doesn’t take away from the fact that some users find it useful, it gives you some context --- when it comes to prioritizing features, we look holistically across our users, and build the features that will add the most value to the largest set of our customers.
- Usage data. In addition to anecdotal feedback, usage was very low. Less than 6% of all prospects users viewed that section of the sidebar every month --- and, in full transparency, that represents 6% of the fraction of all HubSpot users who use Prospects at all. Again, that doesn’t take away from the fact that some find it valuable, but it gives you some insight into the data we take into account when making a decision like this.
- Recent regulations. The GDPR was enforced in the EU starting last week. Under the GDPR, storing IP addresses requires consent. The removed feature didn’t play nicely with that requirement.
When taking all these data points into account, it comes down to this: where can we allocate our resources, to best solve for our customers? The work required to enable the feature to support GDPR compliance as well as the ability collect IP addresses without consent would have been an outsized engineering effort compared the value for the entire customer base.