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One of the biggest and most consistent concerns within a website measurement strategy is the quality of the data. This is especially a concern for large sites where new content is regularly added and the analytics implementation is extensive. All of the larger players in the analytics space offer professional services whereby they perform an audit of your web analytics implementation, however this can be quite expensive and isn’t always a regular activity. It is not uncommon for an audit to take north of 100 hours and with today’s consulting rates, you’re looking at a $20K price tag.
Recently I had the opportunity to test drive ObservePoint’s site auditing solution, which automates the complex tasks of web analytics auditing and website monitoring. ObservePoint is a very robust solution in that it supports nearly every major analytics provider as well as every single custom analytics variable from those providers. So whether you need to focus on an sProp in Omniture or a custom variable in Google Analytics, it’s all possible. I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite features from ObservePoint rather than just writing a massive essay:
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Site auditing setup time: There are no requirements for additional tagging or coding. Simply plug-in your site details, choose your analytics vendor(s), set your schedule and you’re on your way. You can make your audit more advanced by: selecting a specific user agent, adding custom filters or setting up rules to monitor specific variables.
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Granularity of analytics vendor variables: If you looked at the level of variables ObservePoint can monitor, you’d swear that they essentially took every single analytics implementation guide and dropped it into their system.
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Transaction Monitoring: The ability to monitor a series of URLs as part of a process such as signups, shopping carts, or any other transaction. Now take it a step further, use the data from ObservePoint combine it with revenue per goal data and you’ve got yourself a pretty important metric that ties site performance to dollars.
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The Value Ads: Alerts to email/mobile devices, ‘Silent Mode’ so that there are no extra page views in your reports, several server location options for site monitoring, live support (chat) to answer your burning questions immediately, and tag support for beyond analytics such as: DART, ComScore, Quantcast and Website Optimizer.
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A free Firefox plug-in to help you assess page level tagging, JavaScript, HTML, image size or CSS issues.
I have also used it for site auditing and monitoring tags, Site audit section works very well while I did not have good experience on monitoring tags.