Sonar

Dolphin Analytics is a data, tracking, and marketing analytics company that helps businesses understand what is happening across their websites and make their data more useful. Its services cover website tracking, marketing analytics, reporting, and white-label analytics, while its Sonar product provides a free automated way to check what tracking technologies are actually running on a website. The platform is designed around evidence-based analysis, with a focus on identifying real tracking activity rather than making assumptions about how a website is configured.

Sonar is Dolphin Analytics' free website tracking checker. Users can enter a website address and run a scan without creating an account or installing anything. Sonar crawls the website from the outside, similar to how a visitor's browser experiences the site, and identifies tracking technologies that it can observe firing across the pages it analyzes. The tool is designed as a first-pass tracking audit that can be completed in minutes instead of requiring hours of manual investigation.

The scanner checks several important areas of website analytics and advertising infrastructure. It can identify Google Analytics 4 implementations and the measurement IDs found on the site, as well as Google Tag Manager containers and the tags they load. Sonar also detects advertising pixels, including Meta and other ad-platform tracking technologies, and examines dataLayer events used by tags and analytics implementations. Consent configuration is another area of analysis, allowing the scan to identify how consent tooling interacts with tracking technologies. The tool also highlights tracking elements that appear to be broken or missing.

A key principle behind Sonar is that findings are supported by evidence. The system crawls pages, detects tags and pixels, preserves evidence associated with its findings, and then generates a scored report. Rather than simply reporting what a tracking setup is expected to contain, Sonar states that it only makes claims that can be demonstrated through the crawl. This evidence-based approach is intended to make the results useful for marketers, analysts, developers, agencies, and businesses investigating tracking problems.

The resulting scorecard provides an overview of tracking health along with category-level scores and individual findings. This gives website owners a quick way to identify potential implementation issues and understand where their analytics or advertising infrastructure may require attention. Sonar can therefore serve as an initial diagnostic before a deeper manual audit or professional tracking project.

Dolphin Analytics also provides professional services for organizations that need more than an automated scan. Its offerings include tracking, marketing analytics, reporting, and white-label analytics. Businesses can use the initial Sonar report as a starting point when discussing tracking problems with the Dolphin team, allowing conversations to begin with documented findings rather than a purely exploratory assessment.