Spy on Web Analytics Tracking Scripts Using WASP
May 19th, 2008Most people know that Web analytics providers like Google Analytics and Omniture use JavaScript to track user activity on Web sites, but many people do not realize that ad networks like Google Adsense and DoubleClick also track user behavior. It’s even scarier for Web site owners to realize that these third party services have complete visibility into your Web site traffic. WASP is a Firefox plugin that shows what each of these providers are tracking on the page that you are viewing.
Once you’ve installed the plugin and accepted the terms and conditions, you will start seeing the WASP icon in your browser’s status bar that tells you which tracking tools it has identified.
Clicking on the icon will open a sidebar with a tabbed view of all the tracking tools. Each tab represents a tracking instance on the page you are viewing, e.g. an ad, and shows the detailed data that is being sent to them.
WASP is a very useful debugging tool for implementing Web analytics solutions like Omniture because it gives you an easy way to see if you have tagged your Web site correctly. I used the “Omniture debugger” until recently when I heard about WASP in an Omniture training session.