Nowadays, the tracking world is becoming more and more complex with the introduction of many new digital marketing vendors that need to work together and the basis for a good implementation is to have the best tools to debug such implementation.
There are a lot of them out there to help you with this task and today we’re going to see which one suits best your needs when you have to debug your Google Analytics ( and all other Digital Marketing vendors like Facebook, Linkedin, Taboola, etc.. ) hits.
Omnibug
I’d start with a Chrome extension – Omnibug. This extension is one of the most useful extensions you can use to debug your user journey. As you can see from the picture below you have access to all the Vendor hits fired on your website and for each one information like:
- Vendor name
- Hit type
- Account ID
- Hit timestamp
Another very good function of this Omnibug view, which you can use by opening your Chrome Dev Tools and selecting the tab “Omnibug”, is the fact that it divides the hits by page visualised making it a very good tool when analysing an entire tracking funnel on your website.
Furthermore, you have, for each Vendor’s hit, all the available information transmitted outside your browser and it works perfectly also when “Event Batching” occurs – like with the new Google Analytics 4 tag. If you’re used to the Chrome (or any other browser) network tab this extension will make a huge difference in your daily debugging tasks.
Chrome Dev Tools “Network Tab” to debug tracking hits on your website
While talking about the Chrome dev tool “Network tab” some can say that maybe it is not the most elegant tool to visualise hits happening on your website, but it still has more capabilities compared to most similar tools out there. With it, for example, you can discover what the initiator for this particular hit was by looking at the initiator chain or even knowing which cookies were set by that particular hit together with all the timing needed for that hit to be processed and sent back to the Vendor’s servers.
Very soon, we’ll discuss in a new blog post all the capabilities the “Network Tab” has to offer to improve your debugging experience, then, stay tuned!
