There are multiple reasons you might be interested in determining the tags firing—and, in turn, which tags are not firing—on any given website. Reasons may include competitive intelligence to see what tags are loading on other sites, ensuring your analytics data is accurate by making sure your analytics tags are on every page of your site, or discovering new potential clients for your business depending on what tags they are loading. Regardless of the reason, fortunately there are ways to determine the tags firing on any given website—including a revolutionary product developed by InfoTrust called Tag Inspector.
Other Tools
There are a variety of browser extensions that “tracks the trackers”, giving you a roll call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, and web publishers that are running on any given site. They typically capture the tags that are firing on any individual page and display them in a quick drop-down view. Some extensions can also be modified to not load certain tags for testing purposes and privacy purposes (if you do not want to be seen by an advertising platform for example).
However, finding marketing tags firing on a website manually comes with its own set of challenges. One shortcoming of these page-by-page browser extensions is that it’s very time consuming if you want to check the tags firing on each and every page of a site (or try to identify that one pesky page that is missing a tag, causing discrepancies, and inaccurate data). And how can you truly know you checked every page? Do you reference the sitemap? Have developers kept the sitemap up to date?
Tag Inspector
Tag Inspector is a tool developed by the InfoTrust team back in 2013 that fulfills the shortcomings of these simpler browser-based extensions analyzing a page at a time. Tag Inspector will crawl every page of the website entered, including javascript files and tag management systems, to find all the marketing tags of your company’s site, the site of a competitor, or the sites of potential clients. It even analyzes sitemaps and all internal links to ensure pages aren’t missed. It then generates a downloadable report listing all tags and their page by page locations. If a tag fires on one page but not on another, Tag Inspector will inform you of the pages that the tag is missing. Worried about third-party piggybacking tags? Tag Inspector will show those too, and even the tag they’re piggybacking off, via our handy dandy tag hierarchy report all scans come with:
Over the years, more and more features have been added to Tag Inspector, including custom real-time alerts that can let you know if a tag or TMS has dropped off your site. Here’s a brief video explaining some of Tag Inspector’s uses and features.
Tag Inspector has countless use cases, including ensuring the proper roll out of a tag, removal of a tag, migrating to new platforms like a new tag management system, data governance, and more! Sign up for a free account today and launch your first free scan.
