This document helps you determine how many ObservePoint audit page scans you need to meet your organization’s requirements for web governance. If you follow this guide, you’ll be on your way to world class web governance for privacy compliance, tag governance, accessibility compliance, page performance monitoring, and much more.

Tip: Choosing the right number of page scans is more than just counting your pages.

ObservePoint audit pricing is simple: you pay for the page scans you need in a given year. In other words, you only pay when ObservePoint scans a page. There’s no cost per user, and no cost per domain. You only pay for page scans.

How many page scans do you need to buy? To answer that question:

Let’s jump in!

You start by counting all your web pages across all your domains. You will use the total number of web pages in the next steps to calculate how many page scans you need.

If you aren’t sure how many pages you have, here are some options:

Next, determine how many times each page needs to be scanned, a “multiplier”. You will apply the multipliers to your total page count to get a final scan number. The multipliers you need vary by organization. This section walks you through how to choose them.

Some web pages are updated daily. Some are updated yearly. You’ll want to schedule ObservePoint audits to re-scan each page after important changes. You can save money by scheduling audits to avoid re-scans on pages that don’t change frequently.

What does a “change” mean for a web page? The first type of change people think of is content: text changes, color changes, new buttons, new images, etc.

For web governance, you need to think about other changes too:

An important question to ask is how long you can tolerate an issue existing on a page before finding out about it. We recommend daily or twice-per-week scans for your highest traffic, highest risk, or highest release frequency pages. Also, consider which groups of pages tend to behave uniformly. For example, a community forum might have thousands of pages that all deploy the same tags and cookies, because they are all powered by the same template. It might make sense to scan only a sample of these pages. But don’t be tricked by seemingly similar pages that, for whatever reason, use vastly different technologies even though they appear to be powered by the same template.

Your first ObservePoint audits will be useful to determine which pages use similar groups of technologies (e.g., cookies and tags). We always recommend a full-site discovery audit to start.

Armed with this info, you can decide to audit a sample of pages from each group regularly (daily or weekly), and a full audit less frequently (monthly or quarterly).

Tip: the 90/10 Rule. Don't scan every page at the same frequency. Scan your high-frequency pages (top 10%) daily or weekly, and move templated pages, or pages that don't change frequently (bottom 90%) monthly or quarterly.

After you consider the list above, take your web pages from step 1, and decide what frequency they each need to be re-scanned. Some groups of pages may need to be re-scanned more frequently than others. This info is your frequency multiplier.

The visitor geography multiplier is mainly for privacy compliance scanning. Different regions of the world require websites to treat pre-consent visitors differently. So you’ll want to scan your web pages from each of those geographies. ObservePoint supports scanning from 34 locations around the world, with the option to add hundreds of other locations through proxy hosts.

Example geographies to consider:

Consider which geographies your website visitors are coming from, and which web pages serve those visitors. Check with your privacy team about which web privacy legislation is the most important to comply with.

Tip: Check your cookie banner vendor to see which geographies have special configurations. This is a great way to determine which geographies you need.

Tip: Different domains may serve visitors from different geographies.

The number of geographies for each group of pages is your visitor geography multiplier. Combine this with the “persona” multiplier below.

A persona describes the state of a website visitor. Each persona is a potential multiplier as well. Some personas only apply to certain geographies.

Here are some example personas to consider:

If you need help choosing the right multipliers, our experts are available

It can be helpful to consider other factors that aren’t necessarily multipliers, but might help you plan your page scans:

This section walks you through an example with 3 domains: example1.com, example2.com, and example3.com.

ObservePoint is capable of scanning hundreds of thousands of domains, but to keep this example simple, we’ve chosen only 3.

We have 3 domains:

Release Frequency:

Visitor Geography:

Personas:

For this example, let’s assume our privacy compliance team has said each website needs to comply with certain privacy law in the table below.

We will combine the geography multipliers with personas to comply with our organization’s privacy policy.

Put it all together:

This table puts together the multipliers to form a total page scan number:

You can enter that total page scan number in the ObservePoint self-service pricing page and see the cost.

This article gives you all the info you need to estimate your ObservePoint audit costs.

If you need help estimating your ideal audit page scans, contact us!