Responding to Debbie Pascoe’s 16 Aug 08 11:22am comment
I continue to be vexed by internet gremlins. I couldn’t post this comment as a comment so I’m taking Eric’s advice and am posting it as a new post. Sorry, folks.
Anyway, this is a response to Debbie Pascoe’s 16 Aug 08 11:22am comment.
Yes, owners not tagging all the pages desired, intended or necessary. We share that evil, I guess.
I didn’t know so many possible errors could creep in as far as javascript goes. It makes me happy that one of our original design decisions to was make things as simple as possible on the client’s side and that all the heavy lifting would be done on our side. Our side we can control pretty well. The client? Not so much so.
Thank you for describing what is meant by calibration (”automatically scanning the site and uncovering these conditions so they can be corrected”). This is something our technology does during the running of reports (uncovering invalidating conditions).
Calibration should not be a core competency of WA vendors? Yet WA vendors should partner with people who have that as a core competency. Hmm…
So if they should partner with such individuals, they must in some part be assuming responsibility for proper calibration, correct?
I read your Response to Michael Wexler’s Post re:What Web Analytics is Missing and Michael Wexler’s What Web Analytics is Missing… (with any luck I left a comment there). I asked some NextStagers about this. The discussion was very interesting. The core issue is something we’ve seen repeatedly in labs; people making first order estimates based on inadequate data because they failed to figure out the basic parameters of their experimental systems.
After a lot of conversation it pretty much came down to “Yes, calibration should be something offered by vendors” and there was a caveat that plays to your partnering theory, that such a service should be included in the fee structure.
The fact that this topic has risen to the “conversation topic” level is an indication that it happens enough to be recognized in the web analytics community. Of course, one of the joys of our society is that we think contracts assign and absolve responsibilities (except probably with very large clients).
Lucky us, huh? Sometime when we’re together, remind me to tell you what one of our early employees, a fellow from Australia, thinks about contracts in the US.
The amusing piece of all this is (to me) that (I thought) web analytics was all about accountability.
Glad you enjoyed the thumb comment. I only wish it weren’t true so often.
Dean Collins added the following ...
I’m certaiinly not suggesting that we as a vendor have all the answers but isn’t it time that analytics vendors started looking at solutions that dont require tags at all?
If a solution (i mean any solution) is too hard for a client to implement (or do correctly in some cases as tags seem to) then shouldn’t the vendors be looking for an alternative methodology for building analytics information.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Amethon.com
Joseph Carrabis added the following ...
Responding to Nick Potter’s 18 Sept 08 5:43pm comment
You can read Steve’s comment here
Probably everyone is aware of this by now so my apologies for suggesting something long after the fact; I believe Stephane Hamel’s WASP tool does what you ask. You’d need to get in touch with Stephane for more details.
Nick Potter added the following ...
I’ve come in half way through this conversation and admit I haven’t fully read the original post, however I can certainly empathise with Debbie’s comments about tagging errors (this is what it really boils down to!).
WA vendors supply the tools. They provide instructions on how to tag a site. Sometimes they even help with that tagging. However I don’t think you can hold the vendors to blame for shoddy tagging on the part of their customer.
There’s been several posts about integrating WA tagging into CMS. If that’s possible then go for it. It will certainly reduce human error if the CMS adds the tags it needs to (and I’m a big advocate for CMS and WA vendors partnering here). But its likely there are always going to be those exceptions that need to be “hand coded”. And errors definitely creep in.
I’ve been working with our businesses around the world for over 4 years now, purely trying to get the tagging implemented in a consistent, and clearly documented manner and we’re still not 100% there, and this is mainly due to tagging errors - whether inadvertent, or a local business thinking they know better and doing their own thing.
In fact recently we’ve taken the step Debbie suggests - working with a third party to design a test that automatically crawls any of our 150+ sites and checks the tagging. But its difficult to get an automated crawler to log on to a secure site, or complete a multi-step application (it can be done of course, its just not easy). So you’re often still left with the issue of having to manually check some pages.
You suggest that WA vendors who partner with people who have “calibration” (we call it auditing) as a core competency must in some part be assuming responsibility for proper calibration, but I disagree.
Partnering isn’t about accepting the responsibility for their customers tagging. Its about producing a tool that is pre-configured to check that particular WA vendor’s tags - to understand their specific JavaScript - rather than (as we have had to do) develop an auditing solution from scratch. Whether this is offered as part of the WA vendor’s solution, or as a value-add extra is up to each vendor. But the need for such a solution is definitely there.