Essential Google Chrome Extensions for Marketing Analytics
Google Chrome extensions are a key part in debugging or testing the various marketing platform implementations on the website. The article below lists out the extensions that we have been using for quite some time and come handy in our day-to-day tasks.
NOTE - While these extensions have been pretty reliable for us, we would still recommend to do a final check using the "Dev Console" network calls prior to launch.
If you are using any of the top marketing or site analytics Google platforms, Google Tag Assistant is a must have. For DoubleClick, AdWords, Google Analytics (basically almost all Google products) tags, this extension provides clear information of the tags that fire on the page.
- This extension only provides information on the tags fired on that particular page. However, this extension also has a 'Record' feature which creates a log of all the tags fired on the pages being navigated while recording being active. The really cool part about this feature (which we use extensively) is the Google Analytics report. It adds some valuable information to its reports (e.g. Campaign parameters persistence across pages, Change of data through GA Filters etc. ).
Adswerve dataLayer Inspector+ is probably the extension most used by me ( and a definite recommendation if you work with dataLayers). Once enabled, this extension displays all the dataLayer events firing in the Google Chrome Dev Console in a clean and concise manner. The advantage of having it within the console is that you can enable 'Preserve Log' to track all dataLayers between pages. This extension has now also started displaying Google Analytics network calls within the console (with all the measurement protocols) and has recently integrated other platforms such as Tealium as well.
302 re-directs are a commonly used by developers to automatically send users to new landing pages and encounter less ‘page does not exist’ errors. While this works great for that purpose, it has potential to mess up attribution done by site analytics tools. This extension can be used to detect any re-directs happening when a user lands on a page.
If your day-to-day tasks involve implementing and testing Facebook marketing pixels, this extension is the thing for you. It not only shows the different events firing, but also provides information on the custom parameters.
To certain extent, this extension has some in-built Facebook pixel error identification logic. For e.g. if the same event fires twice at the same location, it will display a warning for the same. However, as mentioned above - it is still recommended to use the network calls as the final source of truth.
If your day-to-day tasks involve implementing and testing Bing marketing pixels, this extension is the thing for you. It not only shows the different events firing, but also provides information on the custom parameters.