How VICE mastered Google Analytics Troubleshooting by building our own chrome extension

When Google Analytics stops working, it’s an all hands on deck effort to figure out what happened. Are calls being made on the page? Is the metadata correct? Are the right events firing? At VICE we use Google Analytics to understand audience engagement across our digital properties, and we’ve had a few instances where we inevitably broke our Google Analytics setup.

It’s bound to happen, so as Google Analytics administrators we regression test each release, smoke test new features, and troubleshoot when it hits the fan. Over the years, VICE has built up an extensive suite of events, custom dimensions, and metrics, to ensure we understand how users flow through our site. However, the downside of having such a robust analytics portfolio is that it’s extremely tedious to troubleshoot.

Here are a few of my personal gripes with the debugger.

AMP pages are extremely lightweight so they load really fast. However, AMP pages also don’t allow for javascript to run on the page, which means Google Analytics Debugger doesn’t work on AMP pages. As a fallback, publishers have had to rely on analyzing the network requests within Dev Tools.

Custom Dimensions is the secret sauce behind finding amazing insights within any Google Analytics setup. However, it’s extremely difficult to maintain a mental map of what each custom dimensions references, since the Google Analytics Debugger…

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