We’re glad you could make it. We’d love to answer your question and maybe a few more:
- What is ObservePoint?
- Who uses ObservePoint?
- How does ObservePoint help with analytics data quality?
- What is technology governance?
- What is privacy compliance?
- Where can I see an ObservePoint tutorial?
What is ObservePoint?
Simple Answer
In its simplest form, ObservePoint is software to help companies ensure web analytics and mobile analytics data is accurate and actionable. We accomplish this objective by scanning websites and apps to make sure analytics tags are present and collecting data as expected.
Our category of solution goes by many names: tag auditing, tag governance, web analytics audits, and more. While all these terms accurately represent an aspect of our platform, each is just a portion of the value of ObservePoint, since in the act of scanning your website, ObservePoint can test nearly any hitch, joint, or hinge holding your website together. And we can do it at scale.
Check out the advanced use cases below.
Advanced Answer
Most of our customers adopt ObservePoint to test their web analytics implementation, then discover the many different ways ObservePoint can help with testing and quality assurance for their website and other digital properties.
Our tool’s robust customizability allows you to test for nearly any variable, value, or technology you want to make sure functions properly on your site or app. Here are some use cases:
- Critical path monitoring (such as a sign-up or shopping cart path)
- Data layer auditing
- Privacy compliance testing
- Performance monitoring
- JavaScript error detection
- 400-error identification
- And more
See the video below for a glimpse of ObservePoint in action.
Who uses ObservePoint?
ObservePoint is popular among web analytics and tag management professionals who oversee complex analytics implementations on high-volume websites. These professionals use ObservePoint to verify that their analytics tracking functions correctly for both page load and event-driven tags.
As mentioned, ObservePoint users come for the analytics testing capabilities and then discover other great use cases. For example, web analysts and tag managers often receive questions from their managers and co-workers related to the performance and privacy of the technologies on a site. ObservePoint helps users find answers to both these questions and more.
Check out some of our customer case studies.
How does ObservePoint help with analytics data quality?
Websites have a lot of moving parts and undergo frequent changes. Those changes can result in conflicts that cause analytics tracking to break. Broken tracking means inaccurate data, which inhibits your ability to trust and take action on analytics data.
Some common tracking errors we help our customers resolve include:
- Missing analytics tags. For a variety of reasons, your analytics tags may fail to fire on your site, in which case you lose irretrievable visitor data.
- Misfired analytics tags. If a tag fires at the wrong time (e.g. like if you fired a page load tag any time a given event happened), your reporting will tell the wrong story about visitor behavior.
- Duplicate analytics tags. If a member of your team (or more likely, separate members of different teams) inadvertently install tracking twice on your site, that redundancy will result in inflated data and inaccurate reporting.
These issues happen, making both proactive and retroactive testing essential for ensuring accurate data. ObservePoint’s Technology Governance platform is designed to help analytics and marketing stakeholders automatically test their analytics implementation.
Learn more about how ObservePoint can improve data quality.
What is technology governance?
Historically, ObservePoint has been known as a tag auditing, tag governance, or quality assurance solution. These are strong parts of our history, as we’ve been offering demo website audits for a while, as well as hosted our large Validate conference since 2017. But we’ve grown, and now offer a robust technology governance solution.
Technology governance is a sub-discipline within the broader discipline of data governance, focused specifically on the data collected by digital marketing and analytics tags and sent via network request. With our Technology Governance solution, you can scan the network requests sent from websites and apps in their various stages of development in order to identify potential tagging errors.
Learn more about Technology Governance.
What is privacy compliance?
Because customers expect companies to adopt a higher standard of privacy, and in the wake of public policy reflecting those customers’ expectations across the globe, companies need to regularly test that their marketing and analytics stack meets a rigorous standard of privacy compliance.
Of course, when your site integrates with dozens of third-party technologies, each collecting data and setting cookies, complying with standards of data privacy is very, very difficult. Even if you manage to conduct a comprehensive audit of your technologies to ensure compliance, future changes to your site could result in a state of non-compliance.
Understanding that privacy compliance is a key issue for many organizations, ObservePoint offers its Privacy Compliance solution as a way to automatically test a live website to ensure all technologies comply with internal standards. Some example applications include:
- Technology discovery and testing
- Cookie discovery and testing
- Geolocation of data collection
- Consent management verification
Learn more about Privacy Compliance.
Where can I see an ObservePoint tutorial?
If you’re just curious (that’s awesome if you are!), then the easiest way to see ObservePoint in action is to watch this demonstration and sign up for a sample audit of your own site. If you’re a customer and are looking for some training, you can access videos and documentation at help.observepoint.com with your account credentials.
Hope these have answered your questions.
