- Do you trust the data you are collecting?
If not, in this video, you're gonna learn a framework
to ensure your tracking is working correctly.
I'm gonna give you a five-step process you can follow
to determine any problems with your tracking and solve them.
All and more coming up right after this.
(energetic music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com,
where we teach you the data-driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian, and on this channel,
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials,
and how-to videos just like this one.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now a lot of you guys have followed along
with our tutorials and installed new tracking
on your website over the past few months.
But maybe looking at the data now,
you find that it doesn't seem that accurate anymore,
or is definitely broken.
What can you do?
Well, you could investigate
and see if you can find the error.
How?
That's a question I actually get asked quite often,
so I thought I'd break it down for you.
I've come up with a framework you can use
to find tracking errors, test your existing tracking,
and get a clearer picture of your data.
Now, we got lots to cover, so let's dive in.
(energetic music)
Before we start diagnosing our tracking error,
we need to go through some preparations first.
So step one is writing down your tracking steps and results.
Before you start testing, you want to have a replicable
process to go through with a measurable outcome.
So for example, if your conversion is a transaction
in an e-commerce store and you wanna test that,
you should go through the steps of adding a product
to your cart, going through the checkout
and using your credit card or another payment method,
and then landing on the thank you page
where the conversion actually happens.
Now the results you are trying to achieve is that
the conversion actually shows up
in your e-commerce reports in Google Analytics.
That's the measurable outcome that will determine
if your test was successful or not.
Having steps like these written down will give you
a clear picture of the variables,
and determine a definitive checkpoint to go back later to.
If you are done with this, we can proceed to
step number two which is getting your debugging tools ready.
You cannot see what you cannot see.
Tracking is not directly visible to you
on the website itself, it works by sending requests
to the tools in the background.
So if any errors happened, you wouldn't necessarily
see them in the browser.
That's where debugging tools come in.
Now, it often depends which platform or device
you wanna try to debug, but for web tracking,
we have quite good tools to our disposal.
For example, if you are using GTM to deploy your tracking,
you have the preview and debug console to see
a lot of information already about your tag deployment.
There are also hosts of other different extensions
for Chrome which can make your tracking visible,
depending on your tag.
There's a tag assistant, a tag inspector,
a Facebook pixel helper, WAST, GA debugger, and more.
If you need to see the requests that are really
coming and going from your browser
and you don't mind getting a little bit more technical,
you can utilize the Chrome developer tools.
Other than that, you can also use external proxies
such as Fiddler or Charles, to see what is being sent
and received by the browser.
No matter what you are trying to achieve,
make sure you have the right tools in place
so you can diagnose any problems later.
Which takes us then to step number three,
which is actually testing our implementation.
So with all your debugging tools running now,
you can now execute the process from step number one
and go through them step by step.
Note down if you see any weird errors,
and if you can replicate your end result from step one.
If you run into any major issues, you can go over to
step number four, which is debugging and fixing your error.
And this is really all about asking the right questions.
So in our previous example, if our transaction
doesn't get tracked, I would ask myself,
what needs to happen in order for this to work?
Luckily, there is a blueprint in the Google documentation
which explains how things are supposed to work.
In most cases, transaction tracking heavily relies on
custom data that needs to be pushed to Google Analytics.
I would start investigating with the GA debugger
if this data actually gets pushed,
and if there are any errors on the page
in the markup itself that prevent that from happening.
Yes, this can be quite intensive, technical,
and sometimes frustrating, but it can really help you
to come up with a solid treatment to fix your error.
Then you can go back to your developer,
re-implement, and start tracking your data again.
Once it's working correctly, I would go to
step number five, which is cross-checking.
What does that mean?
Well, in our previous example, we did transaction,
even if they now get tracked in Google Analytics,
it doesn't necessarily mean that this data is correct.
But we can utilize external data sources,
in our case, it would be the back-end order records,
to cross-check that data, and see if anything is missing
or if it's in realms of acceptability.
And by the way, no tracking is always 100% accurate,
so don't stress too much about
a small margin of error that can occur.
(energetic music)
So there you have it, five steps to test
and verify your tracking.
A short recap, first of all, mark down your steps
and end result you need to go through,
then get your debugging tools ready,
then test your tracking by
going through your testing protocol,
and debugging and fixing any errors.
And in the end, cross-check your data
with available third-party data.
So now I wanna hear from you,
what was your most frustrating error
that you had to debug and fix with your tracking?
Please leave a comment below and join the conversation.
And as always, if you like this video,
please share it to your friends or colleague,
and subscribe to this channel
to get more of these videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian, 'til next time.