On The Trail

Some recent posts on the Yahoo! Web Analytics board gave me an idea. For quite a while I’ve had debugging bookmarklets for Omniture and WebTrends. They are immensely helpful and way more convenient than digging through the source looking for an elusive tag. The idea I had was to wrap them all up into one single button — and add a bunch of other vendors.

It turned out to be pretty simple to implement and the result is quite useful and interesting. This code gives you a button on your browser; press the button and it will tell you which tags it finds on the current page — and which it doesn’t find. It currently looks for javascript tags from these vendors:

• Google Analytics
• Web Trends
• Omniture Site Catalyst
• HBX
• Coremetrics
• IBM Surf Aid
• Clicktracks
• Fireclick
• Visual Sciences

It works by checking for the existence of a common element in the vendor’s javascript. So, it can be fooled if the page happens to have that element in an unrelated script or if the implementation uses a non-standard javascript tag. Also, my definition of “common element” may very well be flawed for some of the vendors. I just looked at the code on a few sites for each one and it is very possible that that code was atypical. If you use it please let me know about any false positives or false negatives that you notice.

I also coded it to show what is being sent back to the mothership for WebTrends and Site Catalyst. If you really want this functionality for another tool let me know and I’ll try to work on it. Or better yet, add the functionality and send me the code! I’d really like debugging for Google Analytics so I can see exactly what is being sent back, but I can’t see an easy way to do it. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

I think that’s all the provisos, addenda and quid pro quo. Here is the code (and of course there are browser compatibility issues):

• For Firefox just drag this link up to the “Links” toolbar on your browser (if you can’t see it go to View–>Toolbars and check it): WA Detector
• For Internet Explorer right click on this link and choose “Add to Favorites”. Put it in the links folder and it will show up on your links toolbar (if you don’t see it go to View–>Toolbars just like in Firefox): WA Detector

The browser problem arises because IE 6 will only accept bookmarks that are 508 characters long, so the IE bookmarklet uses an external script file that is hosted at blog.keyes.us. Feel free to use it as is or to copy the file to your own server. I make no promises as to the reliability or longevity of this site.

Also, if you prefer, I made a Pirate WA Detector. It uses a external script file and it should work in Firefox or IE.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Update: I should have mentioned this above, but there are two other vendor discovery tools that I am aware of. Eric Peterson hosts one on webanalyticsdemystified.com and Webbanalys has a desktop application. It also looks like Stephane Hamel is working on one. Stephane also has a nice roundup of the tools here.