foreign
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to the Google analytics tutorial series I'm Matt Landers and in this tutorial we'll discuss how to
troubleshoot and debug your Google analytics setup we'll cover tag assistant debug View and real time
and we'll learn how to use each of these resources to ensure your setup is working correctly
this topic is much easier to understand visually so let's go ahead and jump into
each of these tools and see how to troubleshoot our setup
all right we're in the analytics property for the demo website that we've been working on
during the tutorial series and the first thing that we're going to look at is the real-time
report now the real-time report is a great way to get a sanity check that data is actually flowing
from our tagging setup into analytics but it does kind of have a few flaws and we won't dig in too
much here because we have used this report in the past but let's just check it out see how it works
and then talk about some of the problems you might run into trying to use it to debug your setup all
right let's go to reports go to real time and what this is going to show us is any activity
that's happened in the last 30 minutes now we'll see that I do have some activity here because I
have clicked around on the site but in the last minute the very last minute is shown here there's
no users so what we can do now is we can go over to our site and we can start to click around so
go to the home page maybe we'll scroll down and we'll go to the about page it will go down to
the bottom here and fill out a form all right you go back here maybe we'll click the Tweet button
get some more events flowing through and then we'll go back over to our property and we should
see that event hit and there it is right on time and now we know that we have created
some activity that is showing up in this report now the problem that we're going to have here is
how do we distinguish the activity that we just generated from other activity that's already in
the report and that's where the other tools will be a little better help for us but the real-time
report does give us a great access to the data that's come through for instance we can go over
to our events we can click on page view we can see all the parameters that come through with
that event like page title we can click on it and we'll see all the values that have come through
for page title so this is a really easy and great way for you to see that data is Flowing from your
tally infrastructure into Google analytics but the other tools that we're going to jump into nice are
much more powerful alright so let's jump over into Google tag manager and see how we can preview our
changes which will basically take us to tag assistant to debug our setup
all right now we're in Google tag manager for our demo site and I'm going to show you how easy it
is to get to tag assistant from here if you're not using tag manager that's okay you can still get to
Talia system but if you are it's super easy just go up to the top right and click preview you don't
need to make any changes in tag manager for this to work it just works if you click preview that
will open a new tab to tagassistant.google.com which you can go to if you don't have tag manager
and go through the same process alright it's an asset to connect to our site so you just put in
the URL of your site I'm running this locally so I just have localhost here and I hit connect now
that's going to open a new tab with our site in it but there's one difference we now have
this tag assistant floating pop-up here that shows us that we are connected to tag assistant
all right so now let's go back over to tag assistant we'll click continue and let's
see what we see here so first in the top left we can see our Google tags that were found we
have our Google tag manager container and our Google tag for our analytics config now these
are very similar they show a lot of the same data but Google time manager will show more
data because it's got more under the hood that it's working with like the variables tab here
all right on the left we have our summary and the summary just shows you all of the hits that
have come through where all the tags that have fired if you're using tag manager you'll see
the ties that are fired but you'll also see the tides that have not fired so you could go click
around and try to get these to Fire and have them show up and then ties fired and you'll see
that in the summary view but even cooler than that is on the left we have a timeline view of
all the pages that we've visited so when we open that tab we ended up on the home page
uh but we haven't gone anywhere else yet so let's go over to our tab and there's one little thing
I want to point out here too at the top is that we have this query parameter that comes through
GTM debug that's going to be useful in a minute when we look at debug view so keep that in mind
all right what we're going to do is we're going to click around we're going to go to about
maybe we'll scroll down we'll go to newsletter now let's get back over tag assistant see what's
happened all right on the left now we get this timeline view of all the pages that we visited
first we were at the home page then we were at the about page then we were on the newsletter page and
you'll notice that there's five events that always happen we have consent consent initialization we
have container loaded Dom ready and window loaded after that we'll see other events that Fire based
on user activity so right now we could go back over to the site and scroll down go back to tag
assistant and we'll see now we've added some new events we have scroll depth and Scrolls and then
we can dig in to the data that's sent with these events or triggers we can go to variables to see
any variables related to them we can go to data layer to see any data that's associated to them
for instance here we can see that the scroll threshold was 90 and the scroll units was percent
so this is pretty cool we get a very granular view of what's happening in that particular session
in that tab that's connected to tag assistant now this is very different than real-time report where
we have where everything was cluttered together with other events that had happened from other
users potentially for instance if we go over to our site that's not connected to tag assistant and
let's say we click around here right then we go back to tag assistant we're not seeing these come
through so we're not getting a cluttered view of what's Happening like we would in real time report
but if we go back to the one that is connected and we go to the home page we go back to tag
assistant and we'll see now home is at the top so this is a really great way for you to isolate the
events that are coming through get a good idea of what data is coming through and make sure that the
tags are firing that you expect to fire so now we can go back to our summary for our tags and
we'll see we still have only fired this config tab so let's say that we wanted to fire one of these
other ones we have our share event and we let's say we were trying to test that and make sure
that it's working we would go over to our site we would click the Tweet which we've connected
to the share event in a previous tutorial we go over to tag assistant and now we'll see that our
share of hands here and we can click into that to see all of the data related to it we can see that
it is uh we were as a Twitter click because that's the data that we were sending through and this is
a really great way for you to validate that what is the tagging that you have set up is actually
executing the way that you expected it to all right I think that's a good overview of
tag assistant let's dive into debug View and see what the difference is there and what we can see
okay now we're back in our analytics property for our demo site and let's navigate to debug View
if we go down to admin and scroll down in the middle column we'll find debug view as the very
last link before product links click on that and now let's take a look at what we see on the left
hand side here we can see a summary of all the events that were sent through and in the middle we
have a real-time timeline of events being sent through and on the right hand side we have a
summary of any debug events that were sent through in the last 30 minutes now the only events that we
see here are from sessions that have debug enabled and the way that you can do that is through tag
assistant like we were just using or you can use the Chrome extension for Google analytics
debugger which there's a link to that in the video description now you're going to see the exact same
data that you saw in tag assistant just display it a little bit differently but we're also only going
to see data that made it into Google analytics whereas in tag assistant we could see any tag we
saw our tag manager tag and our analytics tag and we would see any other Google type there as well
all right so if we scroll down we can look at some of the events that we've sent through if we click
on page view we'll see all of the parameters that were sent through for that page view
and we can also click on the summary which gives us another cool view of all the page View events
that were sent through and the times they were sent through so it's a different way for us to
view those events not necessarily in order of each event but just for the page View events when did
they come through and then we can click on each of those to see their information here all right in
this tutorial we've learned how to use real-time reports tag assistant and debug view to check what
data is making it into analytics and validate that our setup is working correctly hopefully
this is really helpful for you as you go on your journey of tagging your site and validating that
you're getting the data into analytics that helps you write up those reports and make
solid business decisions all right go out try out these tools and until next time happy measuring
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