Live from eMetrics: got interviewed by Robert Scoble

eMetrics is getting close to an end and it's been great for me! Great from a learning perspective, great networking, and great opportunities for my startup.

I was walking down the hallway and bumped into Jim Sterne and Robert Scoble. Robert just interviewed Jim and he was kind enough to mention what I'm doing with WASP. A few minutes later a short video interview was posted on Qik, Robert's "from your phone to the web" platform. Spontaneous, short, quick. I like that. Thanks Robert!



If the video above doesn't work, head over to Qik to watch my interview about WASP.

[WASP] v0.44: site crawl & report now available

A major milestone toward WASP v1.0. This interim version includes minor fixes and enhancement and a couple of long awaited major features.

Major enhancements

• Site crawling: you can now ask WASP to recursively crawl a site and get back the tags. In this version it is limited to 100 pages.
• Open file: got a list of URL's to check? Create a file with one URL per line and let WASP crawl it for you. This feature is limited in this version.
  
• Reporting: at any moment you can get a CSV-compatible report containing the HTTP status of the request, the domain, tool type, tool name, page URL and title and lastly, the complete tag.

New & improved

Here's whats new and enhanced in v0.44:

• Fixed: Sidebar refresh after page load (that bug was really annoying and got people complaining WASP was not working!)
• Improved: Better detection of some tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Improved: Includes/enhanced short help for SiteCatalyst, HBX and Google Analytics
• Improved: Detects a bunch of new tools, see the full list
• Improved: Compatible with the upcoming Firefox v3.0
• Improved: Algorithm for detection further improved
• New: Since WASP detects analytics, surveys, behavioral targeting, a/b & multivariate tools and others, it now shows the type of tool being detected.
• New: People-powered, collaborative support forum using Get Satisfaction
• Improved: Revamped the WASP web site to focus more on the three main use: implementation, analysis, market research.
  

Getting it or upgrading

Three easy ways to upgrade or get WASP:

1. New users: Visit wasp.immeria.net and click on the "Add to Firefox" green button
2. Upgrade: If you already have WASP, the easiest way to upgrade is simply to do "Tools/Add-ons" from the Firefox menu, then click on the "Find Updates" button.
3. Wait: Alternatively, if you already have WASP installed, Firefox will eventually trigger an automatic update and prompt you to confirm.

Coming up next

This is likely the last release before the official WASP v1.0. What remain to be done is:

• Provide a more "analyst friendly" mode*
• Improve the reporting feature*
• Higher limits for crawling*
  
• Implementation diagnostic for Omniture SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics*
  
• Give the option to open WASP in a pop-up window or a bottom-bar
• Option to enable/disable specific tools*
• Licensing model

*Those features are not definitive but very likely. They will be available only in the advanced version.

Now is time to contribute!

There will always be a free, basic version of WASP available.

The more advanced features will be based on an annual license of about 250$ per user (exact pricing to be confirmed). Any contribution received before the official release of v1.0 will be applied as a discount of 200% of the contribution amount.

That is, give 125$ now and get a $250 discount toward the licensing of WASP v1.0!

And by the way, if you like it (or maybe not!), I'm looking for some ratings and reviews on the official Mozilla Addons site

eMetrics Industry Insight: WASP market research

Jim Sterne is a no fuss, down to heart guy. Picture this: evening before eMetrics Toronto; dinner with a bunch of speakers. WASP is mentioned and questions abound: how is it being used? Who are the target users? What's the state of development? etc. Then I talk about the market data I'm collecting: which sites are using which tools, what kind of research I can do with it, etc. "That would make a good topic to present in San Francisco" Jim said... the following day it was set! So here it is:

eMetrics San Francisco: Industry insight, May 4th

As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the interesting side effect of WASP is the ability to do market research. On the back end, I get a bird's-eye view of the marketplace: 350,000 sites on a monthly basis, for nearly 100 tools. Which tools are used by which industries? Which sectors are having trouble with implementation and which are getting it right? What are the industry trends?

This is highly valuable information for market and financial analysts covering the web analytics space, for vendors and agencies looking for prospects, or even companies looking at who is using which tools in their specific vertical.

On Sunday, May 4th, I'm honored to talk about the results of my research alongside Nielsen/Netratings, Jupiter Research, Yahoo!, Hitwise, Comscore and my friend Joseph Carrabis. Register for Industry Insight.

If you want more information about WASP market research please contact me.

WASP: Listening to VOC

One of the challenge with a R&D project like WASP and listening to the Voice of Customer is the number of ideas that comes in and how to sort through them while keeping a vision. Every week I get great feedback, suggestions and comments. Of course, sometimes people will send in a few critics, but that's part of the game isn't it?

Please allow me to share some of those ideas and what I intend to do with them.

Browser extension: yes

From the start I envisioned WASP as a browser extension. In my opinion, it doesn't only makes it very easy to constantly be "in context" of a real user session but it also allows for easy ad hoc testing of transactions, secured areas and development environments.

Actually WASP is only available as a Firefox extension, but you can expect an Internet Explorer one in the future.

Site crawling: yes

I've been running a quick poll for a while and that was one of the question. 43% of those who answered asked for the possibility to crawl a site and report on the tags and implementation.

That's coming up in WASP v0.40, currently awaiting approval from the Mozilla Foundation.

1. "Crawl from here" recursively spider a site
   
2. "Load from file" allows you to pick a file containing a list of URLs to check

Reporting: yes

As you browse (or crawl), WASP creates a session log. The resulting CSV report contains the URL, the type and name of the solutions found on any given page, the page title, the exact tags and some other information. This report is available anytime from the "Save log" feature.

Web service or hosted solution: not for now

I'm not planning to create a remote crawling or web service solution for WASP, at least not for v1.0. There are some solutions like Browsercam.com that will allow you to test remotely and simulate different browser/OS environments. Or the great DejaClick.com Firefox extension from AlertSite.com that allows you to build a test script that you can run automatically (and WASP will record correctly). More advanced tools like HP's LoadRunner or MS Visual Studio Team System Test Edition brings the full range of load testing, unit testing and the tools to manage the QA process and track bugs.

Transaction simulation: not for now

Once the site crawling feature is there, why not simply stick in a transaction simulation capability like what DejaClick offers? Two reasons:

1. there are already great tools to do that and WASP will correctly log the details
2. WASP is currently quite simple to use, adding such a feature would divert too much from the original intent

Just use the DejaClick extension!

Flash & videos: future

As the industry evolves, tags are appearing more and more in Flash animations and videos. WASP doesn't currently detect those tags but this should come up in a post v1.0 version.

More tools detection: yes

The upcoming version now includes over 100 tag-based solutions in various categories: analytics, testing (A/B or multivariate), behavioral targeting, surveys, session recorders, click maps, etc. In fact, some sites have so many tools in place that the status bar and the number of tabs in the sidebar is becoming an issue (I will fix that in an upcoming release).

Please continue to send in your feedback when:

• you know a site as a specific solution in place but WASP doesn't detect it: send me the site URL and the tools that is supposed to be there
  
• WASP doesn't detect a tool and it's not in the list of known tools: send me a sample site the URL and the vendor URL
  

Market research: controlled

As is often the case with R&D projects, one of the unexpected side effect of WASP is the ability to do market research. As per the license agreement and the opt-out option, WASP is sending anonymous information about the domain and the tools found. The initial goal was strictly for debugging and enhancing WASP itself.

In fact, I'm receiving information about 20,000 domains every day, over 350,000 monthly. That provides a pretty good picture of the vendors market shares for various verticals and regions. Of course I can also do specific research from any given list.

This is highly valuable information for market and financial analysts covering the web analytics space, for vendors and agencies looking for prospects, or even companies looking at who is using which tools in their specific vertical. For the most part, this is how WASP will be able to survive as a commercially viable product. I'm sure you will understand I will keep a close control over this information and how it is being collected.

If you want more information about WASP market research please contact me.

Send in your feedback and suggestions

I have created a customer support collaborative environment to ease the gathering of suggestions and comments using a great new service called Get Satisfaction.

I've got some offers for help, people asking to open source the code (which I won't), even some investment proposals. I still need some time to continue the "incubation" phase and the planning (hey! I've been freelance only since December!).

But I'm listening: if you have any ideas for WASP or any business proposals, don't hesitate to contact me.

Quality assurance using WASP: tag all pages

In a post from a year ago, I was commenting on the challenges of JavaScript tagging. Here, I want to share some insight and advantaged of doing web analytics implementation quality assurance using WASP. This will take the form of a series of posts, each one addressing a specific issue.

Tag all your pages!

First and foremost, we need to make sure all pages are tagged. Obvious isn't it?

What strikes me when beginning with a new client is how bad their web analytics implementation is. Missing tags is the #1 problem to look into. Sadly, the area that are left out are transactional areas: the outcomes! Why?

• It's more complex to tag transactions beyond the mere "page view" tags
• Content areas are often rendered out of templates, transactions require case by case tagging to be implemented
• Transactions are often under the realm of IT and changing them implies "negotiation" for resources, timely delivery, tests and answering any security considerations.
• In some cases, transactions are on a different host and even a different technology altogether
  

The WASP advantage

Using a crawler such as the excellent SiteScan by EpikOne to check if all pages are tagged is a start, but it's not enough (plus, that's fine for Google Analytics but none others). A crawler won't be able to log into secure areas of your site, fill forms and execute transactions. Most crawlers will look for a specific string within a page, so even if the JavaScript code is there it doesn't guaranty it will be executed (more on JavaScript execution in a later post). Using the debugger provided by the solution provider, such as the one from Omniture, is fine for ad hoc tests, but hardly usable and often hard to decipher. Using proxys such as Charles, ieWatch or Fiddler is interesting, but they work at a lower network level and are way too technical. The other alternative is to open your wallet and work with Maxamine to do a complete and thorough web analytics, security, web compliance audit.

Because WASP blends itself into your browsing session, you will be able to go into any area of your site and make sure the tags are correctly implemented, even checking if specific parameters are being set correctly: custom variables, events, segmentation, etc.

Simply put, I'm from the school who think quality assurance of transactions can hardly be automated. You have to define test scenarios and diligently go through them not only to make sure the transaction work as expected and provides the appropriate results, but also to make sure you are measuring them correctly.

Coming up in WASP

The next release of WASP will include a couple of long awaited features:

1. Site crawl*: from any page, launch a recursive crawl of all pages on that same site.
2. List of links to parse*: already have a list of URL you would like to scan? Simply open the file and WASP will visit all of them and report back the results.
   

This is perfect to check the non-transactional pages of your site. For transactions, you will still be able to use the passive page checking already offered.

You will also get two ways of viewing the information:

1. Web analytics implement view: what's currently shown by WASP
2. Web analyst view*: showing simplified and plain English information about the tags found on that page.

Another request that was on queue: results are going to be available as a CSV file with domain, page, web analytics solution found as well as the exact data sent.

* Those features will be part of an advanced version of WASP available on a subscription base/purchase only.

Another web analytics vendor market share study

As is often the case with startups, the initial idea leads to another better one. One of the amazing side effect of WASP, other than being the only tool able to detect over 70 vendor tags and working passively as you surf, is its ability to be used for competitive and market research analysis of web analytics vendors.

Couple weeks ago Brian Chappel reported about the top retailers, YourPosition.ch also did a study using WASP, and just a few minutes ago, VKI Studios posted a study of the top 500 retailers called "Is Google Analytics taking over the world?". Among other things, they reveal 37% of the top 500 retailers use Google Analytics and 32% use Omniture.

Meantime, WASP is maturing, bugs are being fixed and new features are being added toward the official v1.0. The long awaited site crawl is underway, as well as a more "human friendly" view of the information and some other little surprises.

[WASP] minor bug fixes - v0.32

I decided to do another quick release of WASP to fix minor issues.

Getting it or upgrading

Three easy ways to upgrade or get WASP:

1. Visit wasp.immeria.net and click on the large "Download" button
2. If you already have WASP, the easiest way to upgrade is simply to do "Tools/Add-ons" from the Firefox menu, then click on the "Find Updates" button.
3. Alternatively, if you already have WASP installed, Firefox will eventually trigger an automatic update and prompt you to confirm.
   

New & improved

Here's whats new and enhanced in v0.32:

• Improved: There's one major change in this release: WASP now looks at the HTTP GET rather than the RESPONSE. A bit technical, but what this means is a slightly better detection. I was also able to further optimize then detection algorithm.
  
• Improved: WASP was already handling Google Analytics (GA code) and Google Analytics (Urchin code) and now offer better handling of Google Website Optimizer.
  
• Improved: For Omniture SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics, there's now a quick-help that shows when you click on one item from the tree.
• New: Now detects 77 solutions including WysiStat, TNS Metrix, ProspectXtractor, m-pathy.

What's next?

Following my call for "angel advisers" and a "user group" I got amazing feedback. On the advisers side, I'm very thankful to great minds of the web analytics industry who took some of their precious time on the phone or through email. People like Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash Kaushik, Joseph Carrabis, John Hossack from VKI Studios, Eric Peterson and Brian Clifton. I was in "listening" mode, gathering recommendations and advices to better orient WASP from a business perspective. The next step will be to reach out to the user base and set the list of features and prioritize them for a v1.0 of WASP.

WASP: Looking for advisors

The level of interest toward WASP is increasing. Users as well as interested parties such as web analytics companies and consulting firms are sending in feedback and feature requests, or asking for free market data. Considering WASP is still far from being a commercially mature product, granted it's a free tool done "on the side" that doesn't actually bring revenues, I don't want to rush into a direction and spend a lot of time without making sure it's a viable path. At the end of the day, there's still a business case to make and an ROI to justify!

Some facts

À la "Visa":

• wide visibility in the web analytics industry,
  
• 72 tools detected: web analytics, ad networks, a/b & multivariate,
  
• 35,000 downloads since v0.021,
  
• 6,000,000 pages analyzed per month,
• 125,000 sites analyzed per month,
• $250 in revenue... priceless...
  

What I'm looking for

I'm looking for individuals for two main things:

• WASP users, either implementation specialists, consultants or analysts who are willing to provide feedback and test new versions
• Angel advisors who are willing to advise me on the business side: which revenue model is most promising, what's their reading of the market, which business pain point WASP can help solve or ease, etc.

I heard the WAA was talking about creating a WAA Lab to foster innovation, R&D and provide advice. That's exactly what I'm looking for :)

If you are interested, please contact me.

WASP v0.31 is out

I decided to do a quick release of WASP because a couple of people inquired about the new features.

Getting it or upgrading

Three easy ways to upgrade or get it:

1. Visit wasp.immeria.net and click on the large "Download" button
2. If you already have WASP, the easiest way to upgrade is simply to do "Tools/Add-ons" from the Firefox menu, then click on the "Find Updates" button.
3. Alternatively, if you already have WASP installed, Firefox will eventually trigger an automatic update and prompt you to confirm.
   

New & improved

Here's whats new and enhanced in v0.31:

• Cool! There is now a special handling for Google Website Optimizer. If the page is an original page, a variation page or the conversion page, it will be indicated in the sidebar.
  
• Cool! Google Analytics handling of cookies is a bit special, to make it easier, they are now expanded into a subtree.
• Cool! When Omnniture SiteCatlyst or Google Analytics are detected, each variable now has a short description of its usage. Those descriptions will be improved in coming releases to link to articles and knowledge base. I'm still looking for a complete list of Google Analytics QueryString parameters and their use...
  
• New: Added piwik and phpmyvisites
• New: Detects the new Tongji Baidu, a Google equivalent from China
• Fixed: Fixed CrazyEgg detection
• Improved: Increased tracking cache from 5 to 7, track only what appears to be a public host, strip www from tracking host
• Bug fix: Right-click on status bar doesn't toggle sidebar (show pop-up menu)
• ... and VisualSciences/WebSideStory HBX is now called Omniture SiteCatalyst HBX :)
  

Free Landing Page Optimization webcast from VKI Studios

Last week I had a very interesting chat with John Hossak, VP of Business Development for the Vancouver-based VKI Studios.

John will be doing a free webcast on Google Website Optimizer on Feb. 5th. He will go through the step by step process of doing landing page optimization:

• Determining an appropriate test methodology (A/B, Multivariate, etc.)
• Deciding which page elements to test
• Developing test pages
• Implementing the tests
• Analyzing the results

Based on his valuable feedback, WASP will include information specifically geared toward Google Website Optimizer. It will tell you if the page you are viewing is an original page, a variation page or a conversion page used as part of a test.

WASP usage tracking: full disclosure & ethics

I'm generally receiving very positive feedback about WASP and I take great pride in reading and replying to every mail I get about it. Since WASP is and will remain a constantly evolving tool for an ever changing industry, I'm also listening to "the voice of the customer" in order to decide what to do next. This morning I received something that I want to make public and comment about:

I have just noticed when debugging a client’s website that your WASP utility is tracking every request that we are making to all the sites that we visit whilst this utility is installed in our web browser.

Sorry, but I think that this is too invasive and as such I am uninstalling the utility.

Is this commonly known? If not I encourage you to make it known as I am sure others will be as uncomfortable with this as I am.

The facts:

• It’s clearly indicated on the addons.mozilla.org page, that WASP has a privacy policy
• It’s indicated in the EULA shown on the addons.mozilla.org site as well as the one shown at installation time, if you don't agree the extension is not installed
  
• You can turn that off from the Options menu.
• I'm using a tweaked implementation of Google Analytics to track host name/tool name, and some other default info like geographic region as automatically collected by Google Analytics.
  

What can you do?

• Turn off this option
• Enable WASP only when you want to check a site. WASP can be turned on/off by doing right-click/disable on the status bar icon. In this case, I don’t get any info... but see below why it's important.
• Uninstall WASP... sadly :(
  

What can I do?

• Maybe change this feature to be opt-in instead of opt-out.

What I already did:

• In the latest version currently available (v0.30) I have tweaked this behavior so I only get 1 data point per host/tool found (having it for each page was a bug in v0.29!).
• In v0.31 actually under development I have tweaked it further to receive less data and filter out what looks to be an internal domain name or IP address.
  

Why it's like that?

The collected data allows me to improve WASP: knowing which tools and where they are used helps me identify bugs and required features. For example, the next version will include more features specifically targeted toward Google and Omniture. Another side effect of the data collected through WASP is the ability to provide market research information such as the vendor market share I have started to publish.

The ROI

We're into web analytics and we know how important it is to measure, and especially measure ROI.

For the user, WASP ROI is easy: it's free, it saves valuable analyst/implementation time that can be several hundred dollars an hour, and it provides valuable information on the spot as well as market information available nowhere else.

Honestly, I have spent countless hours working on this tool and it’s based on voluntary donations. The economic model simply doesn’t work: less than 250$ donations after over 30,000 downloads, 200,000 data points collected daily, accounting for 15,000 web sites analyzed on a daily basis! One of my alternative is to provide market reports and sell them so WASP remains free. I’m also seeking other alternatives, such as corporate sponsorship from the web analytics vendors. Just to be clear, I want to continue to offer a free tool to the web analytics community, but even if I don’t get rich doing it, it has to do economic sense for me.


I know there’s a fine line between privacy and justified data analysis and being in the web analytics field, I want to make sure that I’m not crossing that line. Finally, WASP is still in beta, and feedback is very important! I carefully consider every comment I get.

I hope you will use or continue to use WASP and don’t hesitate to provide feedback and comments.

Blocking web analytics solutions?

Adam asked this very interesting question on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum: "I have a client that claims that visitors are able to block all of the Omniture tags on their site. Is this possible? I'm not referring to cookies, rather the entire functionality. Has anyone else ever heard of this? If so, how can a visitor do this or what apps can cause the Omniture tags from firing off."

I see many ways this could be done with various levels of efficiency, and this is true of any tag-based solution, be it web analytics, ad networks or even widgets such as Feedburner subscribers count and many others. Some people have already highlighted a couple of ways. Here's some more info:

• Disabling Javascript: mostly unrealistic, this would render the web almost unusable. I don't believe a large portion of users would do that, other than privacy idealists who would pay everything cash to avoid being tracked by credit card companies...
• Disabling 3rd party cookie: obvious and easy, and that's why it's so important to use 1st party cookies, or at least what is called "friendly 3rd party cookies"!
  
• Antivirus/antispyware/ad blockers: also obvious and mostly the same thing as disabling 3rd party cookies because those tools will look at the 2o7.net used by Omniture (or whatever tool)... again, use 1st party cookies!
• Special browser extensions: most of them use simple URL and cookie detection... again, use 1st party cookie. More advanced ones might look at the presence of a specific Javascript object and substitute the function by a stub one... This is probably the most effective and advanced way of doing it. Doing this with Greasemonkey would be very easy.
  

Which brings an interesting point... while developing WASP I thought about adding an option to block specific tags/solutions. In some cases it would make sense for WA analysts and for implementation quality assurance. I decided not to do it because this would have made WASP the best anti-web-analytics tool on the market! I think education is better than this!

But then again, although 3rd party cookie blocking is easy, it's still not pandemic and there are "clean" ways to work around it (and I'm not talking about exploiting Flash Local Shared Objects to bypass cookie security!). I think cookie deletion is a much wider problem and it might have more impact on our analysis capabilities. Totally blocking a specific web analytics, yes, but would it be statistically significant? Surely not.

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped" - CMS Watch

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped", that's the headline of the press release from CMS Watch I got in my mail box this morning.

They go on to say that "today (they) rejected the snowball of hype suggesting that Google Analytics and Omniture are the only remaining solid choices for Web Analytics" and "CMS Watch research finds that enterprises can select from a broad selection of established vendors that work well in diverse scenarios and can scale as web site traffic grows".

CMS Watch is absolutely right that there are some great products, some of them much better suited for a particular client and situation (because of price, local presence, specific features, etc.). This seems to be especially true in Europe.

However, I don't agree that larger market share means over-hyped. Are they delivering on their promise? I think so.

Furthermore, you can't really compare Google Analytics and Omniture, they are at different positions on the large spectrum of web analytics solutions.

Google Analytics is great to start in the field and Forrester put it near the middle of their Wave: good offering, good strategy. Other products can compare advantageously to Google Analytics.

I also share Forrester's opinion about Omniture: strong strategy and strong offering. Omniture SiteCatalyst goes way beyond Google Analytics in terms of segmentation, custom metrics, system integration and advanced analysis capabilities... for a price. But web analytics doesn't stop with data collection and analysis, one need to look at the larger offering and think about other complementary tools to complete the Trinity approach put forward by Avinash Kaushik: Behavior, Outcomes and Experience. This includes A/B and multivariate testing, surveys, performance analytics, etc. Should you go with best of suite or best of class?

Companies looking at spending tens of thousand of dollars annually in a multi-year contract for a tool/service, training and put their faith in such a product to take important business decisions better do their research seriously. Although expensive, I think the report might make a lot of sense for companies currently in the selection process.

The web analytics vendors market shares I have started to publish might also be a consideration in the selection process. I leave it to you to decide if going for the bigger player is a good or a bad thing.

It's still XMas time: WASP 0.3 released

What is WASP?

(if you still wonder...)
WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists and web analysts who wants to do quality assurance and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented.

>>> Install it now! <<<

What's new

It's getting very close to v1.0, I still have one small memory leak to fix (when closing a pop up window) and I want to tweak a little bit more for Omniture and Google. Here's what's new in this release:

• Now detects 68 web analytics and ad networks solutions
• Tweaked tracking for Omniture SiteCatalyst and the recently released new Google Analytics tags
• Various bug fixes, including a memory leak and the "hanged" status bar icon bug
• Improved analytics of web analytics... that is, WASP includes it's own tags that allows me to provide web analytics vendor market shares statistics (you can opt out of this feature from the options menu).
  

Your feedback is important!

Thanks to all of you who sent me such great feedback. Companies from all around the world are contacting me to add new products that have a local focus, such as in Brazil, Spain and Italy. Your positive input is always appreciated, but constructive critics are also accepted!

If you haven't done it yet, please take a few seconds to fill out my two quick polls:

1. If a special edition of WASP had a price tag, which packaging would be most effective for you? Take this poll
2. Which features would you like to see added to WASP? Take this poll

If you are inclined to do so - or if you use WASP for professional purposes - a donation would be appreciated!

Web Analytics vendors market shares

In this second installment of my analysis of web analytics vendors market shares, 7,788 web sites were analyzed between December 4th and January 2nd.

Figures remain very similar to last month's results, which makes them even more valuable because we now have a baseline of nearly 15,000 web sites and over 300,000 page views that were collected over a period of about two months:


Remember last month I said "Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture". As we see in the next chart, SiteCatalyst alone already has more depth than Google. That is, more page were viewed where Omniture's solution was found than pages with Google Analytics. What does it mean? Basically it's a confirmation that sites with high traffic implements Omniture SiteCatalyst more than anything else (maybe not such a big surprise).


Some interesting insights:

• It will be interesting to see how MS Gatineau will grow it's market share.
  
• Solutions such as TapeFailure, RobotReplay, ClickTale, CrazyEgg were found on less than 1% of the sites.
• WebTrends is a bit tricky since WASP doesn't look at log-based solutions. So in this case, WebTrends stats are only for WebTrends Live (i.e. pages with JavaScript tags).

Again, your feedback and comments are welcome.

Note: This anonymous data is collected by WASP from users who have not opted-out from sending it. WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who wants to understand how their behavior is being analyzed.

Web Analytics market analytics

WASP was primarily created to ease quality assurance of web analytics solutions tagging. But as often the case with innovations, the primary idea leads to a bunch of other possibilities. I also listened to your suggestions and 20% of the 120 respondents to my little poll about future WASP features said they would like to get market stats.

How does it work?

WASP was downloaded about 30,000 times and the latest version includes it's own analytics tags. This means that I can collect anonymous and aggregate information about the tools implemented on the sites visited while WASP is active. So as you browse, you not only get info about the tags on a page, but you also contribute to a global view of the web analytics market. A bit what like Alexa does for site rating, but especially made for web analytics. Cool isn't it? (And yes, this is stated in the EULA and no personal information is collected).

Here are some base metrics:

• 30,000 downloads since the first version of WASP released in Feb. 2007,
  
• 8,000 installs of the latests in a month,
  
• 200,000 pages analyzed in a month,
• 10,000 sites analyzed in a month

I think we now have enough data to look at!

Web Analytics market shares

Out of 10,016 sites visited by about 8,000 users over the last month:

• Google Analytics was found on 64% of them
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 16%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 8%
• WebTrends on 7%
• Coremetrics on 2%
  

But, when looking at the volume of traffic, we find this:

• Google Analytics was found on 34% of the page viewed
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 20%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 15%
• WebTrends, 9%
• Coremetrics, 2%

Analysis of web analytics vendors market share

Despite Google Analytics taking the lion share of the market in terms of installation (64% of visited sites), Omniture SiteCatalyst move to purchase VisualSciences is very wise. Not only it will give it nearly 25% of the market, it will also put Omniture at par with Google in terms of reach (as shown by the 20%+15% combined page views of SiteCatalyst and HBX). Simply put, Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture and VisualSciences.

With the recent tsunami of changes at WebTrends, it will be interesting to see if their market shares will erode in the future. Coremetrics getting out at 2% seems a bit low, especially considering Forrester's most recent positioning put them with the Leaders, with a stronger strategy than Omniture and show a similar market presence. But that being said, Forrester also shows WebTrends with an even stronger market presence in the same quadrant, which I find a bit odd.

I'm curious to hear you about this first analysis. Does it make sense? Considering WASP looks at actual sites being visited instead of information provided by each vendor, could it reveal a more accurate market picture or be somehow biased?

WASP 0.29: a week later

It's been a week since the release of WASP 0.29 and being in the field of web analytics, I couldn't resists reporting on some insight I got.

Numbers, numbers, numbers

• Number of downloads of WASP in a week: 4,500
• Total number of downloads since first launch: 24,000
  
• Number of sites visited by WASP users in a week: 4,300
  
• Number of pages analyzed by WASP in a week: 63,900
• Current number of products detected by WASP: 55

I could release some market share numbers, but I don't feel it would be fair because the sampling is not large enough. Let's just say that in absolute number of sites tagged, Google Analytics largely dominate (twice as more as) Omniture SiteCatalyst (twice as more as) WebSideStory HBX, then WebTrends Live and Coremetrics.

I'm receiving great feedback about WASP. People like the new status bar indicator and I received a couple of requests to for additional products to detect, or small glitches here and there on specific sites (usually sites that have weird implementations!).

What you want to see in WASP?

Let me share my dilemna regarding an advanced version of WASP: aim for the mass or aim for the bucks?

• Creating "WASP Google Analytics Edition" would probably be very popular, but SiteScan exists, is free, and is doing a good job. Furthermore, from a purely commercial perspective, why would people pay for a QA tool while Google Analytics is free?
• Creating "WASP Omniture Edition" would probably be much more interesting, especially with the type of clients Omniture has and the recent industry shakeup.

Which brings the next question, below "Which features would you like to see added to WASP?".

But this inevitably brings another question...

Which model would fit?

So far, I have spent dozens of hours (I stopped counting!) working on WASP. Creating WASP is a great experience in itself and it's rewarding to see the interest picking up. Honestly, it's also bringing a fair amount of "attention" which translates in other opportunities. Being perceived as a thought leader, innovator and helping out the community is great, but in and by itself, WASP needs to bring some tangible outcomes.

It's interesting to see that most respondents to my little survey say a "donation model" appears to be, in their view, the most appropriate one. The WASP user interface clearly shows a "Make a Donation" button and the website as a clear call to action to make donations. Here's the results:

Since the first launch of WASP, there has been 2 donations, for a whopping total amount of 30$!

Am I complaining? No! I just thought I would share this info and seek your input. Please fill out the poll. Please send in your comments and if you are inclined to do so, let me know, honestly, how much would you pay to make sure your site is correctly tagged? (or email me privately)

WASP 0.29 released!

What is WASP?

By now, most people in the Web Analytics sphere have heard about WASP. WASP is the free Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who wants to understand how their behavior is being analyzed.

By automatically detecting the tags on a page and displaying detailed information about the data being sent, WASP can significantly ease the tagging process and increase the quality of a web analytics implementation.

What's new?

It took a while to get this version out the door, but the folks at Mozilla are doing a great job ensuring Firefox extensions abide to quality standards and good practices! Some noticeable changes are:

• Now detects 55 solutions!
• WASP icon shown on the status bar
• Enable/disable WASP from the status bar
• Fixed most problems related to tab browsing
• Even more optimization
• WASP uses web analytics too! WASP has been instrumented to collect anonymous usage information. This will allow me to improve WASP and eventually provide market data. Of course, this feature can be turned off from the Options dialog.
  

Visit wasp.immeria.net for full details or see the complete revision history and the FAQ.

Your feedback is important!

I've received a lot of feedback from the community and this helped shape this release of WASP, determine what should be improved and developed in the future. Your positive input is always appreciated, but constructive critics are also accepted!

Please take a few seconds to fill out my two quick polls:

1. If a special edition of WASP had a price tag, which packaging would be most effective for you? Take this poll
2. Which features would you like to see added to WASP? Take this poll

If you are inclined to do so - or if you use WASP for professional purposes - a donation would be appreciated!

Quick poll: How should WASP be sold?

As you might know (or not), I will soon be a freelance web analytics consultant. One of my goal is to continue the development of the Web Analytics Solution Profiler. I see two levels of offering:

1. Free: A free version (in fact, donation based, but that model asn't proved very effective!) that will offer basic implementation diagnostic.
2. Special Edition: A high-end version that will go in much more details for specific web analytics solutions. Think of it as "WASP Omniture Edition" or "WASP Google Edition", etc.

Some of you answered my previous poll about "Which features would you like to see added to WASP?" and 40% of you said "site crawl and implementation diagnostic".

I'm now seeking your input to see "Which WASP packaging would be most efficient for you?". Please take 2 seconds to answer my quick poll (fill the poll here if you don't see it below).

Feel free to post your comments or send me a personal email with your feedback.

Web Analytics implementation Quality Assurance

Here's a couple of references that should help improve the quality of your web analytics implementation:

• Web Analytics Implementation: Items Overlooked by Manoj Jasra
• Part 1: Your Web Analytics Data Quality May Stink and Here’s Why! by Judah Phillips
• Part 2: Your Web Analytics Data Quality May Stink and Here’s Why!
• Web Analytics and Data Collection: The Page Tag by Judah Phillips
• Web Analytics Technical Implementation Best Practices. (JavaScript Tags) by Avinash Kaushik

Which brings me to the next question: what would you like to see in WASP?

If you don't see the poll, please visit my blog or answer directly.

• More web analytics solutions. The current version of WASP detects 45 of them, the next one already has 50, and there's nearly 200 web analytics solutions on the market, some of them phasing out, new one popping all the time.
• Site crawl and implementation diagnostic. Missing and duplicate tags, JavaScript errors, duplicate page names, wrong location of code, etc.
• Market stats about web analytics solutions. Which solutions are leading the pack? Who's using what?
• Detailed implementation QA for a specific solution, which one? Each web analytics solution has its little tweaks and tricks.
• Others? What would you like to see?

Please fill-out the poll, send me an email or simply post a comment!