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How do I use advanced scan options?
How do I use advanced scan options?

Use advanced scan features such as Macro's, Scan Policies, and URL rewrites to enhance your scan results and obtain the data you need.

Rick Bell avatar
Written by Rick Bell
Updated over a week ago

Learn how to use advanced scan features to enhance your website scan.

Tag Inspector is a industry leading tool that helps our clients:

  1. Create a Tag Governance Policy (Audit).

  2. Monitor their Website against the introduction of unwanted Tags, and ensure approved Tags are on the pages they need to be.

  3. Detect all site Tags for Privacy Compliance (GDPR/CCPA etc.). 

  4. Ensure Website Page/Tag performance with detailed load time metrics.

Advanced Scan Options

To access advanced scan options, login to Tag Inspector, select "Scanner" in the top left corner, then select "Start A New Scan." Type in the URL of the website you would like to scan and the number of pages you would like to scan, then select "Next Step."

This will bring you to the scan options page. After you have selected all the preferred standard options, press the "Advanced Options" button to configure advanced features. More details about the standard scan features and how to run a scan can be found here.

Advanced Options allows you to choose from 6 different features:

  1. Scan behind a login using a Macro.

  2. Apply Policy to this scan.

  3. Scan specific pages.

  4. Remove the querystring from the following URLs.

  5. Rewrite URL.

  6. Clear Cookies on every page.

Scan behind login using a Macro

In some cases you may want to perform a scan for Tags behind a login on your website. Tag Inspector has a premium feature that allows our consultants to create a login macro for you to apply to your scans. Once the Macro has been created for your site you will be able to select it from the dropdown box and apply it to the scan. If you already have a premium Tag Inspector account contact support@taginspector.com to have your custom login macro created.

Apply Policy to this Scan

Scan Policies give you the ability to add a "Tag Rule" to the scan. A Tag Rule is a premium feature of Tag Inspector that allows you to create Whitelist/Blacklist Tag policies to your scan. This feature will notify you if scanner detects any unwanted tags on your URL, or will notify you if desired tags are not found. It also provides a report of Tag violations and lists the URLs containing/missing the violation. Tag Rules are covered in more detail here.

Scan Specific Pages

By default, Tag Inspector will crawl any page on your site in random order. To specify only a specific page or group of pages, you can modify the crawler to only scan the URLs you want.

Example:
Say your company has multiple language versions of your site with different subdirectories to split it up, and you only want to scan the USA English version. If your URL structure is http://www.site.com/locale/ such as http://www.brand.com/us/en/ vs http://www.brand.com/mx/es/ you can set up a rule to scan URL contains "/us/en/".

Select "+Add Rule" to narrow the scan results to the pages you want or do not want scanned.

The drop down box allows you to include/exclude or specify specific pages to scan.

Remove the querystring from the following URLs

Many sites utilize query string parameters to distinguish unique pages for users, though the general content (and typically tagging architecture) can be the same. To avoid scanning the same page multiple times due to unique query strings, use this feature to exclude all additional duplicate pages that contain a question mark ("?") or hash ("#") symbol.

Example:

Say your site has unique product pages that all have the same tagging architecture and layout, only unique content. Your site may have URLs similar to
http://www.site.com/product, http://www.site.com/product?id=1, http://www.site.com/product?id=2 etc. By removing the query string from URL contains /product/, you will set the crawler to skip the "?id=" pages and only scan http://www.site.com/product.

Select "+Add Rule" to remove the querystring from your URLS.

Rewrite URL

This feature allows you to group certain pages together that may contain the same types of tags and avoid unnecessary scanning of similar pages. This is to be used only when certain pages are confirmed to be the same, but may have different URL patterns. You can set regex for the URL pattern you want to group, and identify the substitution URL you want all pages within that URL pattern to be grouped under.
***NOTE this is for advanced users only and utilizes Regex for all set up. It is only recommended for users that know Regex syntax.

Example:
Say you have portions of your site that have unique URLs but contain the same content and tags, such as category pages. Your site URL structure may resemble this: http://www.site.com/category/food, http://www.site.com/category/snacks, http://www.site.com/category/foods-today etc. If you are confident all pages within the /category/ sub-directory are the same and can be scanned as one page, you can leverage the Rewrite URL feature by setting:

URL pattern "\/category\/(.*)" and a substitution URL "/category/". This will group all pages with the subdirectory /category/ together.

Select "+Add Rule" to rewrite a URL pattern.

Clear Cookies on every Page?

The Scanner feature in Tag Inspector is a "crawler" or "robot" that scans every page of the website you specify. It does this over a single session or multiple sessions in the case of large scans. Cookies set by those sessions are detected and reported in the scan report when the scan is complete. Selecting the "Clear cookies on every page" button creates a new session for each page you scan. This will give you a clear view of which pages are or are not setting cookies.

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