1) WASP
WASP is a very popular QA tool. Its power comes from its ability to detect the tracking tags from various tools. Developed by Stéphane Hamel, it can be downloaded in this link:
http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/index.htm
2) Grease Monkey
Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages.
Here’s a list of scripts which will help web analysts, but before that, make sure you have latest version of grease monkey add-ons.
Get greasemonkey can be downloaded here (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748)
Useful scripts:
§ MVT Vendor Detector: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8313
§ Statistics Detector: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6179
§ Custom Scripts for GA
§ Show 100 profiles – Lunametrics
3) Web Developer Toolbar
One of the most used Firefox add-ons; web developer toolbar is a one stop toolbar for all your semi or complete technical needs. Read more and get hold of it here. – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
Web Developer Toolbar add-on
5.) JS View:
How many times did you have to try navigate through the source code to review the tags or see a js library file used by the tag in the html? Especially, when you do this for many pages in a site – say in a conversion funnel – it gets very messy to navigate among source code pages.
With this plug-in, it is much easier to navigate through the source code. You can download it in: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2076
6) Search All: One other monotonous but yet equally important task: Researching our ranking in different engines for different types of keywords, at different times of the day in Paid and Organic Search. Open new tab in the browser for each engine, copy/paste keyword, review results. Search All is a great search engine comparison tool which allows you to search at most 3 different search engines simultaneously and benchmark their performance in the status bar. You can download from this link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5712
7) FireShot:
FireShot is a very handy tool in creating screenshots of web pages, adding comments on the screenshot and sharing with others. Especially in the testing phases of optimization, getting the message across visually is a big advantage and FireShot enables you to do just that. You can download it from this link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648
8) Ghostery – Similar to WASP, Ghostery finds out which tracking methods are used in a specific site to track activity. The difference with WASP is that Ghostery scans web bugs, i.e. one-pixel pictures on a web page, generally used by third-party ad servers.
Whereas WASP is more of a research and analysis tool for a web analyst, Ghostery is also suitable for a privacy-conscious web user as it provides tracking transparency.
The tool can be downloaded here - http://www.ghostery.com/.
Competitive Intelligence Tools
1) SearchStatus
SearchStatus is a Firefox extension that provides very handy shortcuts for things like PageRank, AlexaRank, backlinks, keyword density, link reports, whois and other search engine marketing related tools. Find more information here – http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
Google’s Ad Planner is a tool that gives insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader Internet.
There are 2 main modules: Research and Media Plan.
Here is a quick example that we ran in the Research tool: I want to see how many unique female visitors in the last 30 days in the state of Massachusetts between the ages 35-44 and with at least college education and with annual income between $50,000 and $74,999 visited the website www.bankofamerica.com and also searched for keyword “cash back credit card”. Google Ad Planner tells me there were 16,000 unique visitors. This is the type of insight Google Ad Planner provides. It then shows a list of the ad publishers this segment has visited and assigns a composition index that shows how concentrated this specific segment is on a specific site relative to internet users within US. The tool further provides a detailed site profile for each of the ad publisher visited by the segment we specified. The great thing about this tool is that we can start to form the basics of a persona of the kind of people who we would like to target, i.e. people who searched for our competitor.
3) Google Trends for Websites
Google Trends for Websites (URL with an example): http://trends.google.com/websites?q=bankofamerica.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 )
This is a very useful tool that shows your competitor’s traffic trend overtime along with the other websites their visitors visited and the keyword searches they performed. This is getting to know more around the “persona” and “preferences” of the kinds of visitors who go to a competitor’s site.
4) Google Insights for search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#)
With this tool, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
Also, below is an article on several different free/inexpensive methods/tools to gain competitive intelligence: