Are testers (or devs) doing rigorous testing on GA, Adobe, Tealium, web analytics pixels/events firing properly, in your org?
I’m new to eCommerce website testing. Our testers have their hands full functional testing and we have never really tested to make sure Google Analytics events/data are firing correctly.
But after a botched attempt to update to GA4, we ended up with GA4 only reporting 60% of actual events that were occurring in the wild. Elusive bug, no repro in test env, ended up reverting all GA4 changes in prod and problem went away.
So what do you suggest? Who should do this testing (testers don’t currently even have access to these 3rd party dashboards)? When? And where, it seems our test envs are not readily rigged up to test analytics dashboards.
hey eric,
I have tested with google analytics in the past, we eventually switched over to https://mixpanel.com/
There is most likely a reason why events are not firing correctly: Why Your Google Analytics Isn’t Working (and How to Fix It) (holini.com)
but at the end of the day, it’s not free so probably worth pressing google for support or else switch to a product that does cover all your business needs adequately.
If analytics are a business need then its probably worth having your QA team trained on how to use it, maybe even have a dedicated resource for it, even if its a developer who works on it daily.
In my opinion access to a dashboard is something that can be granted and should not really be a deciding factor in who does the testing. I believe analytics can be picked up without too much effort.
Sorry if I was not able to address all your questions,
good luck!
Neil
Good topic, It’s not usual but it should be a must, sometimes companies depends on data to generate revenue so It’s always a good idea to check this, here my two experiences:
In my previous company we started to use GA4 to track events, and marketing and devs added a bunch of custom fields and info to track, so basically you end verifying 2 things: The event being fired in every path and that the event contains the right data.
For GA4 you can try google tag manager to monitor the events and the data, the network calls from the browser dev tools, and you can also check the datalayer (Using the console in dev tools).
In my current company there’s a custom implementation to track events, and is basically the same, checking logs to see if the event is fired and checking the data.
@jramonp , your #1 sounds about right to me. It seems like a fun opportunity for a tester to gain some expertise in an area. Also seems like a good candidate for some automated checks. Thanks!