As explained in our last post, Analytics Providers are providers of cross-platform statistical analysis that increases their users’ ability to understand market effectiveness. This is a purposefully broad definition, and it encompasses everything from paid Analytics Providers, such as Omniture – a company that can charge thousands of dollars for its software – to free ones such as the classic Google Analytics and also lesser-known utilities with simpler functionality such as the social bookmarking widget AddThis.
They are an important part of peoples’ browsing experience because they provide usage data to developers that help improve then entire infrastructure of the Internet (not just data for merchandising and advertising, which is what we tend to readily associate them with).
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It’s a complicated Internet ecosystem, but hopefully we can provide some transparency into it for our users by providing them with tools like Ghostery and reports like this one, gathered from our GhostRank statistics. Thanks for your support, people!
Also, don’t forget to check out our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, and connect via RSS to stay up to date!
Bonus: Try visiting some of these sites with Ghostery turned on to see who they use for their own analytics providers… The results may surprise you!
Cheers,
Adam
Methodology: This data was compiled via the GhostRank submissions of our users. Thanks to all of you who have opted into sharing the bugs you find with the community none of this could be possible without your contributions.
GhostRank is an opt-in feature included in Ghostery that allows users to submit the bugs they find across the web.
tried to get to Link above ‘like this recent one from Adam’ and got this ‘URL /post/1016020567/top-10-analytics-providers-of-the-past-30-days was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at purplebox.ghostery.com Port 80′
this is the kind of stuff that sends chills: a disclosure doc that isn’t there – what kind of scam is THIS now?, one wonders … i realize it may well NOT be a scam but we’ve all been more than twice burned already … at any rate, after the ‘p=10102 …’ i deleted the last 4 char and added ’0567′ and DID get to Adam’s page … so instead of the ‘post/101602′ etc you may want to change it to yr consistent format ‘p= … 0567′ (yr welcome!
also: when adding new trackers/ads/etc is it possible for you to try to scan the user Prefs, and if we’ve checked them ALL, when YOU add more bugs/trackers/adverts/whatevers, pls add checkmarks *to yr newly added ones*, too … i don’t want ANY of ANYTHING tracking/watching/hovering/intruding in any way on my machine … if one EARNS my trust, i might change my mind FOR THAT ONE ALONE somewhere down the line, but as it stands now, i want ALL intruders TOTALLY blocked and gone … and for that i very much appreciate Ghostery, and am participating in yr ‘community’ … thanks very much
Hi Adam,
Great article about analytics providers! We’re all about Google Analytics and we love using the Ghostery chrome extension when working with clients and their site tags. A problem we noticed is the time spent initially searching for those tags in website’s code, especially if you’re a marketer and not a programmer. Using Ghostery to see what tags are firing on the page is awesome, but doesn’t give us an exact location if we’re interested in using a Tag Management Service for example. So InfoTrust created a free tool that finds tags in your website’s code and generates a report of all tag locations for you. Check out http://www.taginspector.com, which automatically pulls tag locations for you and sends you a report. It’s still in beta but let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how to improve the tool. Love hearing an expert’s opinion!
Amin