In this artcle we shall discuss about Tag Assistant Recordings.
Google Tag Assistant Recordings is an instant validation, diagnosis, and data troubleshooting tool. Google Tag Assistant Recordings lets you quickly validate your website and analyze your Analytics implementation. By recording a critical user flow, you can find and correct problems that, left unaddressed, can lead to inaccurate or corrupted data in your Analytics properties and views. Google Tag Assistant Recordings can also be used to review your tags across other Google products, such as AdWords, DoubleClick and Tag Manager
The problem of bad data
Bad data in your web analytics solution can impact your business negatively in a number of ways. For starters, there’s the time, effort, and expense required to discover, diagnose and fix data issues. It may be difficult to separate the good data from the bad, especially for high-volume sites. Actions based on wrong assumptions are likely to be ineffectual, if not actually counter-productive. And you may miss opportunities that would have been apparent if your original data was valid.
Analytics currently performs regular automated diagnostics on your properties. These diagnostics are certainly helpful but are subject to certain limitations, such as:
- Diagnostics can only be applied to the data you’ve already collected, so any corrupted or bad data is already part of your account.
- Diagnostics can’t crawl pages that are protected by authentication or login walls, or that are part of dynamic page flows, such as an ecommerce checkout process.
- Diagnostics does not understand the structure of your site or the way your users can flow between pages.
- Diagnostics can’t tell you if a problem has been fixed until more data has been collected and processed. By which time, you might have collected yet more bad data if the fix didn’t work.
How Google Tag Assistant Recordings works
Google Tag Assistant Recordings is part of the Google Tag Assistant extension for the Chrome browser. When Google Tag Assistant Recordings is active, you can record the tags, events and interactions for any arbitrary series of pages or sites you visit. Google Tag Assistant Recordings can be used to record all the pages that make up a complete user flow, even if part of the flow doesn’t occur on your primary domain.
For example, a typical user flow might start with a user searching the web for your product, then clicking a resulting paid ad or organic (unpaid) link that takes that user to your site. The user may browse your product catalog, add an item to a shopping cart (which might be hosted on a different domain), review their order, provide shipping and payment information, click a Submit Order button, and finally, return to your site’s Thank You page, where you record a Goal completion.
With Google Tag Assistant Recordings enabled, each of these pages is part of the recording, even those that are not part of your site or that are constructed dynamically (such as the shopping cart’s Review Order page). For each page in the flow, Google Tag Assistant Recordings conducts a number of tests and gathers information on the results, which it will report to you when the recording is finished. Google Tag Assistant Recordings reports only include the data collected by your own flow; they won’t be cluttered with information from other users’ activities.
You can save a recording and reanalyze it later. This means you can make changes to your Analytics account configuration and see the effects of those changes by rerunning the recording against the new configuration. There’s no need to repeat the recording steps. This allows you to validate and refine your configuration in real-time.
Note: when reanalyzing a recording, the hits in that recording are not sent to Analytics, so your data is not impacted as you troubleshoot and refine your configuration.
Google Tag Assistant Recordings can also review your tags across other Google products and non-Google sites.
Google Tag Assistant Recordings reports
Google Tag Assistant Recordings provides two detailed reports:
The Tag Assistant report
The Tag Assistant report shows all the tags that fired on all the pages you visited during the recording session. This includes Google tags, for example, Analytics tracking codes, Google Tag Manager tags, and DoubleClick Remarketing tags, as well as third-party (non-Google) tags that may contain or manage Google tags.
The Analytics report
The Analytics report shows how your recorded data would look when processed by your current Analytics configurations. You can select from amongst all your properties and views to verify your web site and Analytics implementation. You can make changes to your Analytics configuration and easily reanalyze your recordings to test and refine that implementation.
Who should use Google Tag Assistant Recordings
Google Tag Assistant Recordings was designed with two key audiences in mind:
Marketers – anyone making decisions based on Analytics data. Marketers can use Google Tag Assistant Recordings to quickly validate that their site and Analytics configuration are working well together.
Developers – anyone actually building web products and implementing Analytics or other tags. Developers can get detailed information on how the tags they’ve implemented behave so that they can validate their products and troubleshoot problems.
Prerequisites for using Google Tag Assistant Recordings
Currently, Google Tag Assistant Recordings is only available as part of the Google Tag Assistant Chrome browser extension.
Limitations of Google Tag Assistant Recordings
- Unsaved recordings are temporary; they are stored until you close your browser window or start a new recording.
- Saving a recording only preserves the Analytics portion of the recording; the Google Tag Assistant portion and associated report is not saved. You can print your reports to PDF if you wish to preserve them.
- Google Tag Assistant Recordings is currently available in English only.
Article courtesy : www.google.com