Using Observepoint To Scan Your Adobe Analytics Implementation

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While using the browser’s developer tools or Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger works fine to periodically assess individual web pages, manually testing the entirety of your Adobe Analytics implementation is tedious and lengthy work. Using Observepoint, you can scan your Adobe Analytics implementation to locate and test your tags to confirm the correct configuration and ensure accurate data collection. ObservePoint enables you to schedule and run regular audits of your site, both live sites and testing environments, to verify Adobe Analytics remains implemented correctly as your site changes. ObservePoint’s Rules feature allows you to define expectations for your Adobe Analytics implementation, then regularly test your tracking based on the specified criteria. Observepoint will notify you if your expectations do not match the actual outcome. 

Your Observepoint audit will scan your Adobe Analytics implementation and report on various areas affecting data quality, including:

• Tag presence: Identify which Adobe Analytics tags fire on each page and which don’t so that you can make changes.
• Duplicate tags: Locate where Adobe Analytics is firing multiple times per page, which may inflate analytics data.
• Variables and values: Identify the variables and values that Adobe Analytics captures on each page to address missing or misformatted data.
• Data layer: Identify which variables and values are in your data layer, so you can resolve tracking that may be missing or incomplete.
• Tag versions: See which tag versions and report suites are firing on your site to ensure you’re not mixing data between domains or environments.
• Tag load times: Identify how long Adobe Analytics takes to load to ensure the tag doesn’t fail, show errors, or slow down the rest of your site.

When testing your Adobe Analytics implementation, you will want to ensure the following:

1. Adobe Analytics tags are both present and firing 
2. Analytics variables are set as expected
3. Presence of established variable values in the correct format

Testing page load tags & event tags 

After updating your site or tracking, you must verify the above three criteria again for each tag, as well as test page load and event-triggered tags. ObservePoint can help with the automating the process of running these tests with each update you make to your site.

Testing page load tags

As a baseline, your most basic Adobe Analytics tag fire on every site page. If you happen to make an update to your site that interferes with this tag’s ability to fire, which Observepoint will identify, you’ll be able to take note of and address this issue.

Testing event tags

The Observepoint scan can test event-based analytics tags, which is a tag that fires when web visitors complete a predefined action, such as visiting a page, clicking a button, or purchasing a product. You can specify the scan to trigger events on your site and report back to you whether the appropriate analytics tags fired as a result. Event tracking often occurs on a site’s most essential conversion paths, like a shopping cart flow or sign-up process.