Audit Best Practices
Recurring Audits. Audits provide a wealth of information, but provide only a snapshot of your website at the moment that you ran it. To ensure continual accuracy and improvement on your site, we advise that you set up automatic, recurring Audits that will regularly monitor your site. A recommended schedule for Audit frequency can be found further down this article.
Filter. Filter. Filter. You can filter almost anything on your Audit Report, and that filter will persist as you navigate across tabs. Filtering data will allow you to dive deeper into specific aspects of your Report and find the root of any issues that pop up.
Alerts. As if we haven’t advocated for Alerts enough, here’s our final appeal that you set up Alerts to ensure that you’re catching issues at the moment they occur. Once you’ve added a new Alert, you don’t need to run the entire Audit again to activate it. Instead, click on the “Settings” button in the top right of the page, and hit “Reprocess Rules,” “Reprocess Comparisons,” or “Reprocess Consent Categories.” We suggest reprocessing the consent categories as that takes the least amount of time. By reprocessing you’ll be able to activate your Alerts without waiting for the entire Audit to be rerun.
Exporting top URLs
While it is good to monitor your entire site, you want to make sure that you are paying particular attention to your most-visited pages. Using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, you can identify and export your top pages, then run Audits on them through ObservePoint. We recommend doing this every 30 days to ensure you stay up-to-date with your top pages. For more information, check out these articles on exporting top URLs from Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
Audit Frequency
Not all pages are created equal, and some will need to be monitored more than others. We’ve included our recommendations for how frequently you should be running your Audits below:
Audit your most important revenue or important brand driving pages every day
Audit the next level (e.g., landing pages) weekly
Audit longer tail monthly
Audit your whole site map quarterly
Consent Management Platform Tips
In general, you want your CMP to be working daily on your most trafficked pages, and less frequently on your other pages. To ensure that you are getting the best overview of your compliance with domestic and international privacy laws, it’s important to ensure that your Consent Management Platform is implemented correctly. Check out this guide for ensuring the proper implementation of your CMP.
Did you know that you can automate the process of accepting or rejecting cookies and tracking for popular CMPs like OneTrust, TrustArc, and CookieBot? Take a look at this article from our Help Center for more information.
Further Resources
Use Case: Privacy Validation | Help Center
Creating Audits | Help Center