Your digital properties—websites, mobile apps and more—are central to your business. And your customers spend an incredible 5.6 hours per day with digital media. With all of that data to collect—and the technology to pull reports instantly—marketers like you are now able to understand their customers like never before. But is your web analytics implementation bulletproof? In this newly released eBook, you will learn in five simple steps how to: Produce data that you can trust Use free debugging tools to spot-check your implementations Avoid common mistakes in analytics validation

1. ANALYTICS
IMPLEMENTATION
5 TIPS
TO BULLETPROOF YOUR

2. 22
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
TIP 1: LEARN THE TOOL
TIP 2: DEEPEN YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF JAVASCRIPT (AND HTML)
TIP 3: DOCUMENT THE IMPLEMENTATION
TIP 4: SPOT-CHECK YOUR IMPLEMENTATION (AS APPROPRIATE)
TIP 5: IMPLEMENT AUTOMATED TAG GOVERNANCE
BONUS TIP: VALIDATE AT KEY DEVELOPMENT MILESTONES
CONCLUSION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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3. 3
Introduction
There are a lot of moving parts in your data collection
processes—what could go wrong?
The short answer?
A lot.
Your digital properties—websites, mobile apps and
more—are central to your business. And your customers
spend an incredible 3.5 hours on computers, tablets and
smartphones every day, providing ample opportunities
to collect and analyze data.
With all of that data to collect— and the technology to
pull reports instantly—digital marketers and analysts
are now able to understand their customers like never
before. And the architects and developers that support
them have their work cut out for them, because having a
bulletproof analytics implementation is absolutely critical.
With the hundreds to tens of thousands or more
pages you could have on your site, your website
may have hundreds of success events a day, maybe
even thousands. Your site could have hundreds of
variables and dimensions; dozens of network calls
per page; and various APIs that you link into to pull
the data.
Your mobile app is a different problem with the
same variables. How do you ensure your analytics
implementations are working properly across the
board?
The following five tips are designed to help marketers,
analysts, developers, and architects get the most out
of their analytics implementations, ultimately making
it easier to collect accurate data and analyze it in a
meaningful way.

4. 4
Seems obvious right?
If you know the ins-and-outs of the analytics tools in
your MarTech stack, there is so much more you can do
with the technology and the data collected.
But how often do we adopt an operational tool only to
learn a few basic points and never take the time to dig
any deeper?
If you take the time to delve into your analytics tool
and really learn how to operate it, your data collection
journey transitions from a bumpy dirt path to a smooth
road, and turns confusion into clarity. This applies on
both the analysis and implementation sides—there’s a
learning curve for both.
When I was at Adobe, many contracts included train-
ing. But some customers would wait for something—
like getting their installation completed—before getting
trained.
This is backwards—you should be trained before you
implement your analytics. How else will you know how
to plan your implementation to answer your business
questions?
Tip 1: Learn the Tool
Power Tools: What Do You Know
About Your Solution’s Capabilities?
There are so many areas of an analytics solution
worth exploring and mastering. Consider just these
few examples:
First Interaction
Linear
Different tools have different default
settings—what are yours?
Multi-Channel Attribution is a red-hot topic
in the analytics industry, but is also one of
the most poorly understood, and each tool
handles multi-attribution differently.
How does your tool’s attribution
work?
Different attribution models impact the
valuation of your marketing channels—
what are you most interested in mea-
suring?
How does your tool handle the following
attribution models?
Last Interaction
Last Non-Direct Access
Last AdWords Click
Time Decay
Position Based

5. 5
Visitor type
Think of the hundreds to thousands of data
points and the many ways to examine them.
You can segment traffic by:
How can your tool segment
traffic?
Time
Product viewed
Products purchased
Geography
And so much more
Is your tool capable of making these segmen-
tations? And, to expand, do you know how to
set segments up and combine them to get the
most effective intersection of segments?
Visitors
How does the tool handle duplicate:
What about duplicates?
Page views
Events
If you do not know how your solution handles
these occurrences, you might be using inflated
or inaccurate data.

6. 6
Ideas for Mastering Your Analytics Solution
Training opportunities often go unnoticed and unused,
but are a great source for accelerated learning. It was
not uncommon at Adobe for a customer to forget about
the training in their contract until it expired. While we
did all we could to provide the training customers had
paid for, sometimes personnel changed or priorities
shifted and training was forgotten
Check your contract for training
opportunities
Excel at analytics faster by learning from industry ex-
perts around the world in groups such as the Digital
Analytics Association or the Analytics LABS sponsored
by Adobe and ObservePoint.
Join analytics groups and attend labs
There are hundreds of eBooks, white papers, training
videos, articles and blog posts dedicated to educating
users both basic and advanced capabilities of various
analytics tools. Find sources you trust and consume
their content regularly.
Consume content
Senior analysts and architects within your own organi-
zation are an excellent resource to utilize for a focused,
customized training curriculum that offers great value.
Organize internal training
Spending even just one hour a week diving deeper
into the tool and looking into additional resources can
quickly increase your expertise.
Set aside some desk hours
Technology is constantly advancing and it is crucial to
your online success to keep everyone on your team
updated with the analytics improvements.
Some of these options may need to be added to the budget
and might take additional time, but exceptional analysts
are always improving and planning for the future.
Integrate training into every new
implementation

7. 7
If you’re a developer or architect, you may already have
the understanding you need in this area. But if you’re
an analyst or digital marketer, however, there may be
some opportunity for growth here. There’s a growing
space between marketing and development that is the
analytics space, and analysts and marketers who can
learn JavaScript have a lot of power at their disposal.
Developers are very busy, and if you’re not a develop-
er, you should still be able to identify that there is a
problem and know enough JavaScript to say, “I’m not
getting this variable on my page. Here’s where I think
the problem is.”
I can’t tell you how many classes I’ve taught where
people attending couldn’t understand the basics of
JavaScript. They had to work twice as hard just to un-
derstand the discussions, or they would sit there with
blank stares on their faces.
To understand and troubleshoot analytics, you have
to know the technology you’re working with and the
language it speaks.
If you’re an analyst or marketer, knowing JavaScript
and HTML will earn you points with your IT team and
help you better understand the process of collecting
key marketing data.
If you can do a little troubleshooting yourself, you’re
going to save a lot of time and effort because you’re
giving the developer a little bit of a head start, and that
bit of extra effort might make them more likely to help
you out sooner rather than later.
Tip 2: Deepen Your Knowledge
of JavaScript (and HTML)

8. 8
An analytics implementation can be a maze.
You have thousands of pages, most likely on multiple
digital properties, and each of them is tagged just a
little bit differently.
How do you keep track of all those variables? How are
they supposed to be set?
When was the last time they were updated?
It can be a huge undertaking, but documentation is
necessary.
Tip 3: Document the
Implementation
When I worked for Adobe, I had a client who wanted me to teach their team
about implementing Adobe Analytics. After examining their site, I asked,
“Why did you want me to walk you through your analytics implementation
when you’ve already got it all set up on your site?” They said, “Our developer
just left, so we need to be able start where they left off and maintain the
implementation.”
I said, “Great. Why don’t you give me your solution design reference, or the
analytics documentation for your site?”
Silence. It was clear they didn’t know what I was talking about.
Their developer never documented the implementation so they had no way
of knowing what was supposed to be on the pages or what values were being
captured. They were basically blind, and the only way to understand what the
site was capturing was to reverse-engineer the implementation.

9. 9
The Tagging Plan: A Horse of Many
Colors
Whether you call it a tagging plan, variable map, imple-
mentation plan, or a solution design reference, every
organization needs to document their implementation,
specifying when and how each tag should be configured
on a website. This plan is your blueprint of your analytics
implementations.
In my organization, we prefer the term tagging plan,
and always advise analytics practitioners to record and
store their tagging plan in an easily accessible, living
document.
Without this guide, variables may be configured to
fire incorrectly and data quality can be distorted.
Additionally, it might be impossible to know exactly
what is being captured.
List every variable—such as props, evars, page
names, etc.
Think of the hundreds to thousands of data points and
the many ways to examine them. Make sure to do the
following when documenting:
Identify where each variable is collected
Include rules and exceptions
Be able to be tested against the live site
Describe any post collection data manipulation
Below is an example of a tagging plan:

10. 10
Your documented analytics strategy also helps
with validating your data—giving rules to measure
against your live implementations to verify each
variable is passing the correct data, and under the
correct circumstances.
Your organization’s senior analytics architect should
own the document, but it should be accessible to
anyone who has a stake in the analytics operations
or the data being collected.
The variable map should be updated frequently to
ensure it accurately reflects your implementations so
that any developer, analyst, or marketer can clearly
understand how the analytics should work.

11. 11
Analytics solutions don’t always work as you expect
them to. So there will often be moments (either
on the analysis or the implementation side) where
you’ll need to verify that your analytics solution is
tracking properly. Under these circumstances, using
a tag debugger to spot-check your implementation
may be appropriate.
Tip 4: Spot-Check Your
Implementation (as Appropriate)
Spot-Checking Tools and Solutions
There are a number of free tools you can use to debug
tags. Also known as “debuggers,” these tools can help
you spot-check individual pages to verify that analytics
tags exist and are firing correctly. (This is a somewhat
limited process, since you can only check one page at
a time. We’ll show you a more efficient way in the next
step.)
A few solutions for debugging include:
Tools for Spot-Checking and Proxy
Debugging
The Network Panel in Dev Tools
Google Analytics Debugger (for Google tech)
Adobe Debugger (for Adobe tech)
ObservePoint TagDebugger (for any and all
tech)
There are also proxy solutions that you’re probably familiar
with that capture all network requests coming from your
computer and allow you to look through the data being
sent. Some of the most popular are:
Charles Proxy
Fiddler Proxy
We won’t go into the details of using these solutions
here. A lot has already been written that you can find
online.

12. 12
Using a tag debugger isn’t going to be enough. Things
are constantly changing on your website or mobile
app—you’ve got all these moving parts and, likely,
several different teams adding new technologies and
making frequent updates—and if there is so much as
just one typo, things can break.
It is essential that you test your implementations, and
test them again.
Tip 5: Implement Automated Tag
Governance
What Is a Tag Governance Solution?
Tag governance solutions scan the network requests
sent from websites and apps in their various stages
of development in order to identify potential tagging
errors. In effect, a tag governance solution looks at
any network requests coming off a page and, based on
each tag’s structure, determines which tags you have
on the page and whether they have the right data.
The main distinctions (and they’re significant) be-
tween a debugger and a tag governance solution are
repeatability and scalability. While a tag debugger will
allow you, a human, to more easily read requests to
determine if tags are firing correctly, it can only help
you one page at a time.
With a tag governance solution, on the other hand, you
can set a scheduled cadence for when you want to scan
your site and record the data that’s being collected (and
the tags collecting it).
In addition, you can set up rules within the tag governance
solution that correspond to the requirements in your
tagging plan. If at any point the data in a request doesn’t
match what you expect, you’ll receive a notification.
And again.
And again.
And again.
You don’t have time to do that with a debugger. So how
can you implement repeatable tests over time? Via a
tag governance solution.
Save Time and
Make Better Decisions
I had a client tell me that his company used to
schedule 25 hours to manually validate each
implementation—just for a spot-check of major
pages, not the entire site. With ObservePoint,
he brought that down to five hours and it was a
much more thorough job.
Another of our clients, Recruit, used to have
four full-time employees dedicated to testing
their tagging implementation. Now they only
need one person spending only part of his
time because ObservePoint has sped up the
process.

13. 13
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Don’t wait until your website is out in the wild before
you check if it’s collecting data correctly. You want to
make sure you are collecting accurate data from the
outset, not just hoping for the best and cleaning up the
data when it doesn’t work out.
Setting protocols to test at each milestone—in develop-
ment, staging, and after a page goes into production—
maximizes your chances of catching any analytics errors
that can be fixed as they’re found, ensuring accurate
data collection when the site is live.
Ideally, you should QA your analytics implementations
during development, within the staging environment,
and after pushing the site live in order to validate that
everything stays in place and that your collected data
is complete and clean.
Bonus Tip: Validate at Key
Development Milestones
One ObservePoint client, a popular athletic apparel retailer, was preparing to
launch a new website they had been working on tirelessly. They implemented
analytics thoroughly, but just before launch, they discovered something wasn’t
right.
Using ObservePoint’s WebAssurance to QA their analytics, they discovered
some tags weren’t collecting an important segment of visitor data. If they had
not been working through stringent quality assurance processes, they might
never have noticed this gap and would have collected highly flawed data on
their users. By testing their implementations regularly, they quickly found
and corrected the problem before going live, ensuring their visitor data was
complete and accurate.

14. 14
S T A R T D E M O
Conclusion
In today’s competitive landscape, it all comes down
to winning your customers in their web and mobile
moments.
In order to anticipate your customers’ needs and
provide an exceptional experience, your data about
them must be accurate.
However, to collect accurate data for decision-makers
in your organization, your analytics processes have to
be accurate—bulletproof.

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MATT MADDOX
Passionate about training, Matt’s mission is to educate
and enable customers to use the marketing technologies
they select for their sites most effectively.
For more than eight years, Matt delivered analytics
training at Omniture and Adobe and also managed a
customer training team before joining ObservePoint.
He trained globally for many Fortune 500 companies,
creating and delivering custom courses based on their
corporate business requirements.
With a wealth of experience solving analytics questions
in many industry verticals, including e-commerce, media,
finance, lead generation, and automotive, Matt offers
sound direction and analytics insight.
About the Author