changelog
Product Updates: Activity Log, Marketing Tools, and Stronger Account Protection
A quick summary before the details
This update covers four areas: a new activity log for account accountability, three additions to Marketing Tools (QR codes, a web forms builder, and a site contact bar), a referral tracking program, and a round of background improvements to account and data protection. None of it requires you to change how you already use the Hub — these are additive, and most of it is either opt-in or invisible until you go looking for it.
Activity log
Account owners can now see a log of who did what and when inside their Hub account — changes to settings, connections, and other account-level actions are recorded so there's a record to check if something looks off or a teammate needs a reminder of what they changed and when.
This matters more than it might sound like on first read, especially for agencies and teams managing more than one person's access. A lead management system touches sensitive stuff — connection codes, notification settings, integration credentials — and when more than one person has access to an account, it's easy for a setting to get changed without anyone remembering who did it or why. Before this update, tracking that down meant asking around and hoping someone remembered. Now it's a searchable record.
A few concrete situations where this earns its keep: a notification setting quietly gets turned off and leads stop generating alerts — instead of guessing, you can check exactly when it changed and who changed it. A teammate who's since left the business made a connection change months ago that's only now causing an issue — the log still has it. Or you're troubleshooting a support ticket with our team and need to establish a timeline of what happened on the account — the activity log gives both sides a shared, factual starting point instead of a memory-based back-and-forth.
New Marketing Tools
Three new tools now live under Marketing Tools, each solving a specific, common request from beta users.
QR codes. You can now generate QR codes that route straight to a form — printed on a yard sign, a truck decal, a door hanger, or a business card, a QR code turns a piece of physical marketing into a trackable digital lead the same way a web visit would be. Because it routes through the same attribution system as everything else, a lead who scans a QR code off a truck shows up correctly labeled by that source, not lumped into "direct" the way it would with most generic QR generators.
A web forms builder. Building and adding a new lead capture form to your site no longer requires a developer or a support ticket — you can build one directly in the Hub and add it to your pages. This matters for businesses that want to test different form layouts on different pages (a shorter form on a mobile landing page, a more detailed one on a service-specific page) without waiting on outside help every time they want to make a change.
A contact bar. A persistent bar you can add to your site alongside your existing embed, giving visitors a constant, low-friction way to reach you — call, message, or fill out a form — without having to scroll back up to find contact information. Site-wide contact visibility has a well-established relationship with conversion in local service marketing generally: the fewer steps between "I'm interested" and "I reached out," the more of that interest actually turns into a lead instead of evaporating while someone hunts for a phone number.
All three tools capture leads into the same lead inbox as your existing forms and call tracking, so nothing about this update creates a second, separate place you need to check.
To put these to use without overthinking it: start with one QR code on whatever physical marketing gets the most exposure — usually a truck or a yard sign — and give it a specific, human label so the source is obvious in reports later ("Truck — north side" rather than "QR 3"). For the forms builder, resist the urge to build one long form for every page; a shorter form on a mobile-heavy landing page and a more detailed one on a dedicated service page will each convert better than one form trying to do both jobs. And for the contact bar, the biggest gains usually show up on pages where visitors are close to deciding but haven't yet — service and pricing pages more than a general about page.
Why these specific features, in this order
Each of these came directly out of recurring beta feedback rather than a general roadmap exercise. The activity log came from teams with more than one user asking, more than once, "did someone change this?" with no way to check. The Marketing Tools additions came from businesses asking how to get leads from physical marketing — yard signs, trucks, door hangers — into the same system as their web leads, rather than tracked nowhere or manually re-entered. The referral program came from businesses already running informal referral tracking in a notebook or a spreadsheet, asking for a simple way to do the same thing without leaving the Hub. None of these are speculative bets on what might be useful; they're direct responses to specific requests from people actively using the product.
Referral program
You can now track customer referrals inside the Hub and mark referral rewards as fulfilled once you've delivered them. Local Lead Feed doesn't issue, process, or guarantee any reward — it just gives you a place to track who referred whom, so referrals don't get lost the way they tend to in a notebook, a group text thread, or someone's memory of a conversation from three weeks ago.
One thing worth knowing if you plan to pair referral incentives with review requests: the FTC's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials, along with its more recent rule on fake and manipulated reviews, draw a real distinction between rewarding a referral (generally fine) and offering an incentive specifically conditioned on a customer leaving a positive review (a genuine regulatory risk). A referral program that rewards someone for sending you a new customer is a different thing, legally and practically, than a program that pays someone to leave a five-star review — worth keeping those two separate in how you run either one, and this is exactly the kind of question worth a quick conversation with your own attorney if you're unsure where a specific program you're planning falls.
Stronger account protection
We added additional spam protection to account sign-up and sign-in forms — a background defense against the kind of automated bot traffic that targets any public sign-up form on the internet, invisible to real users but effective at filtering out obviously automated submissions before they ever reach a human. Alongside that, we added automatic cleanup of data that's past the retention window it's supposed to follow, so data doesn't linger indefinitely past the point it's actually needed.
Neither of these changes anything about how you use the Hub day to day. They're the unglamorous, mostly invisible half of product work — the improvements that don't show up in a features list but matter for keeping accounts and data clean and defensible over time.
Why we're publishing this as a changelog, not just an email
We're treating this page as a running, dated record rather than a one-off announcement, partly because it's useful for you to have a place to check "did this change recently" without digging through old emails, and partly because it's a more honest way to show what's actually shipping versus what's still on a roadmap. If you're evaluating Local Lead Feed and want a sense of how actively it's being built, this page — along with the FAQ for answers to common setup questions — is the place to check.
A note on how we think about "background" updates
It's tempting to only publish changelog entries for things you can see and click on, and skip the account-protection and data-cleanup work entirely since there's nothing to demo. We're including it here anyway, on purpose. If you're trusting a system with customer names, phone numbers, and call recordings, the unglamorous maintenance — spam filtering on the forms that create new accounts, cleaning up data that's aged past its retention window — is just as much a part of the product as the features you interact with directly. It doesn't make for an exciting screenshot, but it's the kind of thing worth knowing is happening even when it's invisible day to day.
What's next
We're continuing to work through the beta feedback queue — thank you to everyone testing early and reporting issues, however small. If something feels off, missing, or just confusing to use, reach out at support@getwebcanvas.com. Beta feedback is the single biggest input into what gets built next, and specific "this was confusing" reports are consistently more useful to us than general feature requests.