WASP Blog

What’s new in version 2.6.15?

• Firefox 9 support
• Firefox 10 support
• Firefox 11 support
• Bug fixes

you can update or download the free version here: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/try.htm

Web analytics is becoming more and more complex as online business strategies mature. As a result, analytics page tags need to include more data and thus it is important to ensure that this information is being captured accurately. This is not isolated to web analytics, but also any other online solution that relies on JavaScript tags. With all of the solutions available that are being implemented and numerous business people wanting a piece of the resulting online behavioral information, it is imperative that the information be correct and timely.

Given all of these factors, it is vital that the requisite tags are present and accurate to ensure that the resulting analysis best reflects every web page.

It quickly became clear to IBM (Unica) that a product was needed to quickly and accurately gauge what tags are running on any given web page and exactly what data is being reported to not only analytic vendors but also advertisement networks and other online marketing solutions. The typical technical knowledge required to diagnose tagging issues is usually beyond the needed knowledge of a marketer and therefore it is what prompted IBM (Unica) to bring WASP to its clients.

An IBM-Flavored WASP

Extending the value of WASP by working closely with IBM (Unica) to build out additional features and functions created a unique benefit to Unica NetInsight customers. As an example, when a WASP client visits a page that is running NetInsight page tags, the Unica branding appears on the WASP interface and offers product specific variable identification. WASP clients also receive in-application notifications, based on IBM (Unica)-defined rules, if the NetInsight tags are not formatted or executing properly. There are also detailed descriptions and categorizations of NetInsight variables to avoid dealing with variable names that may not be clear at first view.

IBM is offering customers a special WASP license for FREE to take advantage of all of these valuable capabilities. To sign up for the special WASP license unique to IBM go to: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/unica.html

WASP will soon be available in 4 languages!

With the release of WASP 2.4, we are excited to offer German and Spanish translations. Together with English and French, these 4 language options will allow many more people to take advantage of our WASP tag diagnostic solution.

The 2.4 release will also include cool new features like mobile site support…but more on this another time.

This is the most exciting release of WASP we have done so far, exciting for two reasons, one we have some new technology that will help raise the bar in analytic detection and quality assurance and two, we have partnered with two Analytics vendors in order to bring the level of information about those vendors tags to a new level.

New Tag Introspection engine

This is changing the way we look at the tag. We now have a new way to make sure they are executing properly, not only do we look at the data being sent back to the analytics vendor, but now we also look at the execution of the tag in the memory of the browser and detect anomalies that would prevent tags from executing properly before the data is being sent and in case of fault tell you why. It’s sort of like the check engine light in your car, the light turns on and even better, will tell you why it’s on.

Better tag variable diagnostic

We now have better variable diagnostics, by working closely with our featured vendors, WASP now has deeped knowledge as to how your tag should be configured, so if for example a variable that should contain a url has an invalid character, WASP will highlight that variable and tell you why it’s not right. How long does it take to diagnose this by hand ? A long time, WASP tell you in seconds.

New visual high light for premiere analytic partner

We have teamed up some analytic vendor to make WASP smarter and now we carry their branding into WASP, it’s looking way better but also identify for what vendor you get more information.

Other fix

• Provides a number of important stability and performance improvements
• Specific AT Internet diagnostic functionality.
• Specific Unica Diagnostic functionality
• You can now disable Omniture test & target marking
• You can now disable most popup during a scan such as javascript print and other (That was annoying)
• Large scan (read 10′s of tousans of pages) are faster on the reporting

Thanks to all our tester and people that give feedback,

The WASP team

Webinar on the 02/12/10 about how to use WASP to debug your analytic tags.

register here: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/newsletter/semi/

With complex analytic funnels, multiple goal tracking and multiple technologies, keeping your analytics reporting properly can be a long and tedious process. Wading through html source code can take hours and you can never be sure you didn’t miss something.

We are pleased to announce today our new support platform for WASP. This platform allows us to consolidate your emails and forum requests into one repository, which makes it easier for us to help you.

Better search capability lets us find solutions to your problems quicker than ever before. And a more structured layout that includes email tracking and a new in-page widget, lets us streamline our communications with everyone.

Enjoy!

Migrating SiteCatalyst to version 14.9 ?

Any time there is a major update in your analytic tagging, such as necessary new variables or javascript changes that require references to new Javascript code, it can take ages to ensure that all of your tags are updated properly. Verifying large sites by hand is nearly impossible.

To ease this process, you can use the scanning capability of WASP Pro. This simple tool will automatically crawl your entire website and provide a detailed report of which pages have not been updated or are missing tags altogether.

Let me show you how WASP Pro does this. First, you define what you want to scan, including how many pages you want to scan, maximum depth, and even rules as regular expression to filter pages in or out of your scan.

Once the scan is complete, you can view a report that shows you all of the analytic solutions detected and the number of pages that have the solution integrated.

If you click on the tagged pages, you will see a list of all the pages with those tags, in a table format. If you click on the missing pages, you will see all the pages missing those tags. In the example below, we clicked on the missing pages for Omniture SiteCatalyst.

We also have what we call the “upside down” view. Instead of looking at the data at the page level in a table, we give it to you at the tag level using a tree. You can drill down into every single variable and value in order to see what page have those values. If we take our Omniutre SiteCatalyst example, you can see specifically what pages are tagged with what version.

And of course you can always export any of the data in .csv format to analyze in other tools such as Excel.

Naturally, once you have your report you can use the interactive functionality of WASP to diagnose the pages that are causing you problems and make sure all your pages are properly tagged.

Feel free to contact us for an interactive demo.

We just posted a new video that explain how to install and use the basic feature of WASP, enjoy.

WASP Install and basic operation

Great news! WASP 2.0 has been approved for general availability by Mozilla.

We are also working on 2.1 beta which will include some pretty sexy features. Stay tuned for the beta release announcement!

More and more companies are building communities using social networking sites and there has been a lot of buzz lately about tracking Facebook Fan pages with Google Analytics. Integrating GA into Facebook can be a challenge since what you can actually do is limited and trying to see if your implementation of GA works on your Facebook Page can be an even bigger challenge.

That’s why WASP was created, and as you have probably guessed by now, you can use WASP to see if those “invisible” tags you placed on your Facebook page are triggered properly and are sending back the proper data.

Yesterday, I created a Facebook Fan page for WASP, and then followed the instructions here to insert the data I want to feed to my Google Analytics account. I passed in 3 values:  googledomain=facebook.com, pagelink=/FB/Landing and pagetitle=FBLanding.

And, now if I visit my Fan page with WASP enabled, this is what I see:

When I open up the side bar, I can also make sure I am sending the proper data back to my Google Analytics account:

And, even if I created my Fan page yesterday, people are already finding me and here are the result in my Google Analytics report:

Voila! I’ve just confirmed that it’s all working properly. This technique will not only work for Google Analytics but with over 200 analytics solutions detected by WASP, even if they are triggered on event as mention in my event post.