Auditing your website is as important as the need for a complete and regular analysis of your website traffic. Site auditing tools are mostly designed to track down glitches and help you increase the performance of your website analysis. Let’s look at some of the widely used site auditing services and tools.
SiteScan™
This is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if the Google Analytics (GA) Tracking Code is installed properly on your website. It checks for both legacy urchin.js and the newer ga.js tracking code. It scans for several configuration pitfalls and gives you the result in an easy readable file format. It also identifies whether the tracking code is properly installed in your webpages or not and include all these information in the diagnostic report. All this makes it easier for you to track these pages and fix them for optimum performance.
WASP
You know how tagging your online ads are crucial for your business promotion. WASP is a Firefox plugin which allows you to test the state of your analytics tagging faster than ever without having to look at source code. Now with WASP you can see your tags, save time, see detected values, find missing tags, detect double tagging, capture flash events and export data. It is reported that over 10,000 people use WASP to visually detect over 200 analytics solutions.
This is how a quick WASP report looks like:
Statistics Detector
This is a free Greasemonkey script for Firefox. Initially written to detect the usage of Mint in your webpages, this script has now evolved in to a package which detects any JavaScript-based statistics packages. Currently this script supports over 35 statistics packages including Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, SiteStat, etc. Installing and using this is quiet easy.
ObservePoint
ObservePoint offers a wide variety of services including site auditing, monitoring, browser plugins and alerts. All these service can effectively take care of your online marketing data. Some of the stand out services include:
- Automated Tag Discovery
- Invisible Tag Vendor
- Web-based, so no software required
- Tracking missing pixels and tags on your pages
- Worldwide monitoring
- URL monitoring alerts and so on
Accenture Digital Diagnostics
As part of its Digital Optimization Service which delivers an enhanced digital experience to the customers, Accenture provides Digital Diagnostic Service which scans a company’s website, identifies performance barriers and develops a prioritized and targeted roadmap toward an improved site. Other notable service includes Digital Optimization, Digital Advantage and so on.
HBX Active Viewer
This is an excellent tool if your website has a form based application for collecting user information. You never know where and why the user has dropped off your site especially when filling a long form. With active viewing you can work out where exactly the user dropped off and based on this you can make necessary changes to your form, you can also make it friendlier and easy to fill based on this information.
Even on content driven sites it can help you especially with your landing page and recommend things that should go in there which make your landing page stickier.
Httpwatch
This is an integrated HTTP sniffer for IE and Firefox that provides new insights into how your website loads and performs. Key benefits are:
- Seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without changing network settings or adding proxies
- See low-level HTTP information such as headers, cookies, etc. and millisecond accurate timings.
- Real-time page and request level time charts show performance bottlenecks
- Your users and customers can send you log files
- Automatically detects and highlights potential configuration, performance and security problems
Omniture Debugger
This JavaScript-based debugger allows you to view the parameters sent in an Omniture SiteCatalyst image request.
Omnibug
Omnibug is a plugin for Firebug to ease developing web metrics implementations. Each outgoing request (sent by the browser) is checked for a pattern; if a match occurs, the URL is displayed in a Firebug panel, and decoded to show the details of the request. Requests can also be logged to the file system. It supports Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics/Urchin and Moniforce. Custom matching rules can be defined to support other systems.
Charles Debugger
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers which contain the cookies and caching information.
Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to give you a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
HTTP Header
There are many services which will allow you to inspect the HTTP headers that your web server is sending along with your files. You can use this to verify that the correct MIME type (the Content-type: line) is being sent for each file type. This can be a really useful tool.
HTTP Fox
HttpFox monitors and analyses all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web servers. It brings together the functionality from tools like HttpWatch or IEInspector to the Firefox browser.
It gives out the following information as per your request:
- Request and response headers
- Sent and received cookies
- Query string parameters
- POST parameters
- Response body
End Note
Though there are many auditing tools and services available these are most widely used ones. As most of these are free tools you can right now put them to use and maximize your benefits.