Now the second tool that we will use utilize a lot is a browser. You need a
browser to test your website and also see the information coming in Google
Analytics. Now there are different browsers out there as you might be aware
there's Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari. I would recommend Chrome and it's
more of a personal choice. The second choice would be probably Firefox. The
other browsers are a little bit more limited in the extension functionality,
installing plugins which is one big feature of Chrome and Firefox so I would
urge you to use Chrome or Firefox. Now chrome is also a Google tool made by
Google so it perfectly works together with certain features that i will
present in the next chapters. So my recommendation tree is to use Chrome. Now
let's go through some of the advantages you might find these advantages also in
other browsers. But in this course I will purely use Chrome. First advantage is
that you can install extensions. So there is an extension store and we'll go
through the plug-ins that you need to install in the next videos. But it's safe
to say you can extend your Chrome and your capabilities of your browser to
better serve the purpose of testing Google Analytics. Second big feature here
in Chrome is the development tool bar. So you can access that by going to your
view and then opening it up in the browser which will give you this panel
down here you can do a lot of different things. I would encourage you to either
try it out or do load it on of a course on it there is a great course by Code
School which is free which will take you through all the different features. What
we will use mostly here is this DOM Element View and the Console View and
we'll come to this in a second. But it's safe to say the developer tools that you
get with Google Chrome are very powerful and we can
perfectly use them to check our Google Analytics installation. Now the second
advantage which is really big when you are testing websites and look if the
implementation of Google Analytics is done correctly is the Incognito browser
mode. So if you go to file and open up a new Incognito window, this will give you
a clean slate so to say of your browser view. So you can really simulate a new
user coming to the page without any caching and without any cookies that
might be stored on the page. And once you close it and go back to your normal
window it will won't retain all these cookies and the cache that has been in
there so you can just open up a new one and can simulate a new user. And going
back to the advantages the third big advantage for me in Google Chrome is the
user functionality. So up here you can click a button even in the menu bar
you'll find people and there you can put in different profiles of your Chrome
browser. Now why is this useful? If you have worked with Google products you
might know that it is a little bit tedious to login or logout from an
account. And if you have for example to clients Google Analytics account on a
different Google Analytics user, you need to switch them very often. And what I do
is just make a personas for my different purposes and input them as people within
my browser. So I have all these different profiles that I use for my daily work
and once I click on a browser here, it will open up this browser for with
different plug-ins installed so it is a new set of browser basically which can
be really useful and if you want to go into Google Analytics later and you
find that you are already logged in with the appropriate new username.
So that's it with the features of Chrome. Obviously you might have some of these
capabilities in other browsers and I would urge you to try it out. I can just
say that a lot of people out there who are working with Google Analytics are
using Chrome or Firefox. And now let's talk about all the features that you get
when you want to extend your browser and which plug-ins are particularly helpful
for us.