SITE AUDITS
Audits require a third-party to check all the data collected for your website to ensure that it has been processed and reported on correctly. Auditing your results provides confidence internally and externally in your results. In many sectors, it also allows you to publish your numbers 'publicly' for comparison with other web-sites.
In the UK and throughout Europe, audits are usually conducted in conjunction with the ‘Audit Bureau of Circulation’, universally known as ABC.
In 2001, Intellitracker were the first vendor in the UK to conduct an audit with ABC, and we undertake a considerable number of audits each year. As a ‘two star associate’ of ABC, and because of our experience in this area, we are able to make a potentially uncomfortable and lengthy process smooth and simple.
The COI (Central Office of Information) has recently announced that all the Government Department websites must be audited by ABC within the next year. Departments must ensure that every website planned to be open after 1 April 2010 have an audit schedule ending no later than 31 December 2009. Government web-sites using Google Analytics will be UNABLE to comply using this tool, as it does not allow log data to be exported, nor has it been used with the ABC audit process.
What do we do?
Our philisophy is to manage the audit process with ABC, from beginning to end. We undertake:
- All communication with ABC including completion of the audit (claim) forms
- Collection of data to ABC standards, including:
- Exclusion of spider/robot (non-human) activity, using ABC published list
- Exclusion of activity relating to your own staff, using defined IP addresses
- Retrieval of all raw data files for the period you are auditing
- Conversion of this data into a format suitable for ABC
- Testing of all data, to ensure that your data is correct
- Delivery of these files to ABCe in a timely fashion according to their specifications
- All post-audit communication and queries