WASP 0.23, release notes

What is WASP?

WASP is the 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.

How useful is it?

One of the largest sources of error in analytics is the accuracy and problems with implementing Javascript tagging. While some web analytics tools use one simple tag to collect data, others requires custom tags that can become overwhelmingly complex to implement. It is therefore important that you validate that your tags are capturing exactly what they are supposed to. WASP will ease the process of detecting the web analytics solution and showing exactly which values are being sent to the web analytics data warehouse.

Using WASP

1. Install the WASP extension in Firefox
2. Once you have restarted Firefox, from the Firefox menu, do View/Sidebar/WASP
3. While you surf, the WASP sidebar will refresh with available information about the current page being visited
   

Detected web analytics solutions

Confidence levels refers to the avoidance of true-negative and false-positive detection by WASP itself and is really not related to the features or security aspects of any of the listed products.

• High confidence: should be identified nearly 100% of the time. Best confidence is when the specific account id of the WA solution can be found directly in an HTTP Get request
  • Coremetrics
  • Google Ad
  • Google Analytics
  • Nielsen/Netratings
  • Omniture
  • StatCounter
  • NetTracker/Unica
    
  • WebSideStory HBX (Now Visual Sciences)
  • Web Trends
• Medium confidence: detection based on the presence of specific hard-coded values
  • AuriQ
  • ClickTracks
  • CrazyEgg
  • Fireclick
  • IndexTools
  • IntelliTracker
  • Nedstat
  • Visual Sciences
• Low confidence: partial detection only, can't parse QueryString and/or cookies
  • DeepMetrix (MS Gatineau)
  • eVisit Analyst
  • HitMatic
    
  • IBM Surf Aid (now Coremetrics)
    
  • iMinr
  • Instadia.net
  • Lynchpin
  • MoniForce
  • MS AdCenterAnalytics
  • mTracking
  • OneStat
  • OpinionLab
  • speed-trap
  • WebtraffIQ
  • Xiti

Enhancements and bug fixes

• Now detects 32 web analytics solutions
• User interface improvements
• More accurate refresh when browsing or switching tabs

Upcoming features

• Display information about 1st and 3rd party cookie status
• Display HTTP headers
• Display P3P status
• Put supported tools in a configuration file editable trough preferences
• Allow sorting of value-pairs, copy (or export) of values
• Add knowledge base links allowing to get additional information on any piece of data being sent
• Handle frames and iframes
• Add a tab to show Alexa and Google PageRank information about the page currently being displayed
  

Known bugs

• None for now...

Your feedback is important!

Like it? Or not? Would like to see a new feature? Found a bug? I'm building this tool out of my free time and my reward is your feedback!

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