A couple of years ago we started using a service from the US called ObservePoint to help provide quick and cost effective solutions for large scale tag validation across websites. We were so impressed with the service that we’ve included it in our standard implementation and validation process.
ObservePoint crawls across the target website and captures all of the data that is sent into the analytics (and other) platforms. It then generates a set of reports that show whether pages are tagged, what’s been tagged, how many errors there are, what the errors are, etc. They now support 110 tags across Analytics, Advertising, Ad Measurement, Data Management, Behavioural Targeting, Split Testing, Video, Tag Management, eCommerce, Voice of Consumer, Lead Tracking and Social Media.
And they’ve got some pretty fancy technology behind it all too. Instead of qatar email list 476676 contact leads just looking in the source code for your tags, their servers across the US, Australia and the UK actually render the page in a browser. By rendering the page they get the full picture – they see all of things that will be sent to your analytics platform. And, as they actually execute the Javascript, they can also report on JS errors.
But don’t worry, they won’t inflate your numbers either, they intercept the vendor call and stop it from being made.
They can also get “beyond the firewall”; checking tags on password-protected sites, dev environments, intranets and other non-public sites. Perfect for that pre-launch comfort.
You can also get a full data extract into Excel that shows the page URL and all of the props, eVars, events, campaign codes plus a whole heap of other data useful for quickly reviewing everything, particularly if you use the Excel Filter feature.
But it doesn’t stop there – you can automate things so you get a monthly scheduled audit done, you can also get SMS or email alerts when tag values change or simulations fail.