For someone who is not an expert on marketing, it may be difficult to even know what Evidence does. I'm a writer, podcaster and a programmer, so I have a different perspective.

Here's what Evidence does: whenever an event happens one on of your websites Evidence collects the data. And then it displays them on your website.

So when a user on my website writes a comment or listens to one of my podcasts, the other users see a nice little notification in right-bottom corner of the screen. The notification has a name, title and link to the episode.

And that's basically it.

But the strength of Evidence is in its simplicity and good design. All you need to do is to insert a bit of code on each of your websites. Everything else you do right in the Evidence control panel. And you can do basically whatever you want, the system is designed in a smart way and it's very flexible.

The biggest pain may be making the websites send over the data to the Evidence server. It is done by webhooks and if you are lucky enough to use one of the services they already handle, you're set and good to go. If not, well, you have a problem.

However for a programmer, it's a paradise. Since I designed my own website I could easily add my own webhooks. So now I send over every user-generated event I can think of. If you smile to an image of a cat my website, I get an event. And other people can see a notification "somebody just smiled at a cat few moments ago". It's pretty cool.

I really like the fact that you can use your events across multiple websites. It's very easy to get a source of events from one website to show notifications on another. This is more useful than you think, if you run several projects on internet. You can do a lot with a tool like that. And if you can't, I certainly can.

I wonder if you can make Facebook send some user-based events to Evidence. Probably not. I couldn't find a way to do it. But who knows, maybe in the future.

To make it easier (I suspect) the Evidence website speaks in the marketing language: there are "campaigns", there are "conversions" and so on. Well, for me it's just confusing. I'd rather have "projects" or "events". Just more generic names. Maximizing sells is not the only possible purpose for using Evidence. Far from it! But as I said, I'm a programmer, my view might be distorted.

The system is quite mature already. But there is still some room for new toys and improvements, so I hope they'll keep up the good work. I bought one code, tested what it was that I actually bought, and then right away I bought another one. It's a powerful tool, well worth the price. And you never know what you can use for in the future.

It's one of those things you don't know that you need until you see what it does. So if you bought a code or two or seventeen, you will be really glad that you did it. Or you already are.