Google’s Tag Assistant Helps to Verify Analytics and Measurement Setup

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Google announced a new Tag Assistant Chrome Extension last month and we had a chance to install and test it out recently. The new extension will help to verify that you have setup your tracking properly on your website and other online properties.

According to the Google Analytics blog, ” A new Chrome Extension created by engineers here at Google hopes to make troubleshooting tag installs much easier. Tag Assistant aims to highlight errors, warnings, and provide useful suggestions for Google’s most widely adopted tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Adwords Conversion Tracking, the new Remarketing Tag, Trusted Stores and Floodlight. ”

We primarily use the powerful Google Analytics (GA) to track our website data and it is relatively straightforward to setup on a basic website. However there are times when customizations, advanced tracking or technological complications make a proper setup difficult. And considering Google Analytics can take up to 24 hours for data to show *(although it has gotten much much faster recently), it can become challenging to test if your conversion tracking and goals are setup properly.

For many years we have used the “Got GA? – Is Google Analytics Installed” Firefox add-on which places a small icon in the status bar that will tell you whether or not it detects GA running on the page you are on. This has been an invaluable tool over the years and still is. It is very basic and does not provide any other information, but to see if a site is running Google Analytics or not, it make it dead simple. Although as of recently we have experienced a few more complex setups that were not detected even though the code was running. Fortunately we discovered why it was not detecting the script.

Fast forward to Feb 2013 and the new Chrome plugin. Google has finally made it much easier for us to detect if their code is on a page or not with the new Tag Assistant. It will even show any errors and provide some additional data to help troubleshoot any issues. The new Tag Assistant was able to easily detect several instances of GA code running on a site we had audited and it was discovered that this conflict was the reason that our older Firefox add-on was not detecting any script at all.

Download the new Tag Assistant Chrome Extension from the Chrome web store.

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Published On: Mar 19, 2013