OX2 provides, among other things, web site auditing services for our clients. We try to help them figure out what they really want to get out of their web site, especially when the answer isn’t quite so obvious as “increased online sales.” Sometimes it’s providing product information to prospective customers, then referring them to retail sales partners. Other times, it’s helping provide product support, such as downloads of product manuals or tutorial videos. And sometimes, it’s engaging readers by providing content, as on a site for a magazine or newspaper publisher.
One of the steps of our audit is to help make sure that their analytics tools are capturing everything they are expected to. But no matter how well-written the javascript code is, and how well the Rich Internet Applications are designed (RIA such as Flash, Flex, AIR, Ajax, and others), if you have a partner such as an advertising agency who is helping with the design and implementation of your site, then you have to have a good process in place to make sure that your analytics tagging is consistent and complete.
For many of our clients, great care is taken to ensure their primary site is well-maintained, but the process sometimes fails when multiple agencies help create sites for individual countries, or business units or divisions of the company, individual product lines, or even one-off campaigns, such as launching a new product and coordinating it with television, print, and other media vehicles.
When we explain why consistency and completeness are important to gathering metrics, so that business decisions can be made with the benefit of insight and interpretation from robust data, our clients are often ask us if we can help validate their data capture efforts.
This is when we are pleased that we have partnered with MAXAMINE to offer their tactical-level auditing solutions to complement our strategic-level process and design work.
Their TagMAX solution, for example, will ensure that every element of every page is properly tagged, and even notify you when old tags (from your earlier experiment with a free analytics vendor) have not been removed, and are causing your site visitors to experience delays in loading pages that you may not be aware of. They can tell you if your custom variables were tagged on each section of your site, and help alert you if your CMS isn’t auto-tagging certain pages the way you thought it was. The more complex your data schema, the more you need to use a tactical-level auditing tool like TagMAX, not just once, but on a monthly or at least quarterly basis, to validate your internal and partner tagging process.
Naturally, their site provides full details about their Knowledge Platform, which can be hosted Software as a Service, or installed on your own servers. It will index content, capture all images, documents, scripts, and so on, parse the javascript for correctness, submit forms to validate your data capture engines are working properly, and so on. You can even use the content indexing with their FindMax tool to fine-tune your on-site search engine.
We’ve found the pricing to be almost trivial, when compared to the return from fixing and streamlining broken conversion funnels, and having trustworthy data to base your analysis on. Especially if you factor in the site validation costs as part of your overall web design and implementation budget, using MAXAMINE’s platform as the basis of your site and process audit is pretty much a necessity.
Feel free to contact us if you have more questions about how you might benefit from using MAXAMINE to validate your own web site and ensure your analytics process is based on valid data capture.
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 