WASP Blog

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 are very excited to announce the recent release of WASP 2.1.

Whats’s new?

• Detail view of your tags
  - Never miss an in-between call again, as we keep track of the last 5 pages you browsed
  - Filter solution list by type, so you only see what you need
• Capture title, description and meta data of the sites you’ve scanned to allow enhanced SEO and a powerful tag cloud for easy analysis and drill down on the specific pages that use those tags
• Localization in French
• Execution time and latency information for all the tags
• Seomoz.com related SEO data in the WASP popup
• Additional tags detected
• Minor improvements, including bug fixes as always
• Market research functionality to analyze your competitors’ sites (Did we mention new tag cloud! )
• Automate market research scans

Thanks for all the great feedback from the community,
and the help from my beta testers (yes you guys )

We sincerely hope you enjoy the new release!

BTW, you can try it free here: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/try.htm

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.

In January 2010, iPerceptions ran an analysis of the top 500 retail websites to determine how many were using web analytics tools. Online retailers are recognized leaders when it comes to integrating new web applications. A fast-growing, conversion-driven group, their choices often foreshadow those of other industries. Using iPerceptions’ WASP Market Research, we fed the Internet Retailer Top 500 Retail Web Sites into the WASP crawler, and based our results on the 458 sites that were operational. Last January, Stéphane Hamel, founder of Immeria, wrote “An Immersion in Analytics” after conducting a similar study of the same sites. His results form our 2009 data.

WHO RUNS ANALYTICS

In the last year, the use of clickstream analytics tools rose by 10% in the online retail space. External research confrmed a 9% growth in clickstream analytics technology in 2009, which suggests that technological growth is in line with market consumption.

Breakdown by Vendor

When the results were broken down by vendor, the use of Google Analytics increased by 19% — more than twice as much as the next leading vendor. Google Analytics is a free product, unlike the ones from Omniture and Coremetrics, which surely accounted for at least some of its growth. Among paid products, Omniture gained the most ground through 2009, confrming that these tools have a great deal of value.

Is one tool enough?

% of the Top 500 Sites Running Clickstream Analytics by Number of Tools

In the last year, the share of retail websites running more than one clickstream analytics tool increased by 9%, begging the question— why is one tool not enough? Are retailers comparing results from multiple tools to ensure accuracy of the data? Or, does no existing product satisfy all retailing analytics needs?

% of the Top 500 Sites Running Clickstream Analytics by Number of Tools

In January 2010, online retailers who were using more than one tool were almost certainly using Google Analytics. Results suggest that Google Analytics is the easy (and fnancially justifable) choice among retailers, but it is not always the frst choice among customers who are looking for specifc functionality and can afford it.

Other website tools

The second most popular tool, after clickstream analytics, was an advertising network (Ad network), used by approximately one-third of online retailers to host ads. Testing tools, such as Google Website Optimizer and Omniture Test and Target, came in third, followed by Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tools, such as ChannelAdvisor and comScore. Voice of Customer (VOC) tools, such as iPerceptions’ webValidator and 4Q Survey, were used by 8% of retailers (incidentally, a signifcantly higher use compared to other industry sites). Targeting, such as Amadesa, and Recorder tools, such as ClickTale have low adoption rates in this market. Social sharing tools, such as RPX and AddThis, are also on the rise, with more sites wanting to integrate social media components, liaise with social media/networking sites, and generally create a sense of community.

Conclusion

Running clickstream analytics tools is becoming increasingly important for major online retailers. Google Analytics is the most popular tool, and has gained signifcant market share. Still, there is evidence that paid products still have a safe hold. Based on the premise that retail websites predict behavior in other industries, the use of additional analytics tools will continue to gain momentum. Finally, as clickstream tools reach market saturation and retailers reach the limit of insights gain through these tools, they will increasingly turn to other analytics solution such as Testing, SEM, VoC to enhance the effciency and quality of their online experience.

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