adobe analytics debugger safari

Adobe Experience Platform Debugger overview

CREATED FOR:

Learn how the Adobe Experience Platform Debugger Chrome extension and Firefox add-on helps you debug your web implementations of the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, tags and more.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/32156?learn=on

Additional Resources

• Download the Firefox add-on
• Download the Chrome extension
• Experience Platform Debugger documentation
• Debug a tags implementation

Top Features

• Web Governance Overview
• Privacy Validation
• Technology Governance
• Landing Page Validation
• Cookie Governance
• Tag Initiators

Featured Content

• Resource Library
• TagDebugger
• 2022 Digital Governance Report
• Forrester Report
• Privacy Report

Get to Know Us better

• News & Media

3 Ways to Debug an Adobe Analytics Implementation

The goal of debugging an Adobe Analytics implementation is to verify your tags are firing as expected on any given page.

Specifically, you’re trying to answer the following questions:

• Is the Adobe Analytics tag present and firing off its request to the analytics server?
• Does the request to the analytics server include all the variables I expect?
• Are the variables populated with the right values in the right format?

Below are three ways you can debug your Adobe Analytics implementation, listed in order of most manual to least:

• Checking network requests with the developer tools
• Using an Adobe Analytics debugger
• Conducting an automated Adobe Analytics audit

1. Checking network requests in dev tools

The most basic way to debug your Adobe Analytics tags is by perusing the Network tab in your browser’s developer tools. This technique will work on any browser but is largely unnecessary considering the availability of free debugging tools to accomplish the same task.

For the sake of illustrating why analysts prefer to use the subsequent techniques over this one, here is the basic process for debugging a network request using your dev tools.

Locating the tag in dev tools

• Open your browser’s developer tools in Chrome , Firefox , or Safari .
• Navigate to the Network tab.
• Initiate the action that should trigger your tag to fire, such as a page load or an interaction event.
• Locate the network request that should result from that event. Finding the request is most difficult the first time. Common ways to find the request are by filtering the list for terms like “adobe” or the subdomain you set up for your tracking server.

If you can’t find any request, go back to your tag manager to evaluate your triggering rules to see why the tag isn’t firing as expected.

Debugging the analytics request

• Select the request and scroll down to the section that says Query Parameters (assuming data is being passed via query parameters and not via POST payload).
• Select “View Decoded” to decode the URL character encoding.
• Locate the variables you want to check and verify those variables are present and contain the values you expect.

Below is what the full process might look like:

As you can imagine, this process will become highly tedious after even just a few repetitions. Thankfully, you should never have to take this approach, since, at a minimum, you can use an Adobe Analytics debugger to more easily debug individual requests.

2. Using an Adobe Analytics Debugger

ObservePoint’s TagDebugger is a free Google Chrome extension that enables you to debug not only your Adobe Analytics requests but also those of any analytics platform collecting data on your site. You can also see other installed marketing vendors, like social media pixels, marketing automation tags, and more.

After you install the TagDebugger in Chrome, here are the basic steps to use this free tool.

How to use our Adobe Analytics debugger

• Open your Chrome Developer tools.
• Locate and click the new tab that says “ObservePoint.”
• Refresh the page. You should start seeing the tool capture and parse recognized network requests.
• To filter for any Adobe Analytics requests, click the filter button on the Tag Name column and type in “adobe analytics.” You’ll be able to see high-level data about the tag like the Account (i.e. report suite), Category (i.e. analytics), status, and more.
• To see specific variables in the network request, click on the tag you’re interested in. You will then be able to peruse which variables are present in the request, as well as the data contained in each variable.

Here is what that process would look like:

Upgrading from manually reviewing network requests to using a TagDebugger is a powerful leap. Debugging tags this way is perfectly suited for situations where you need to:

• Quickly validate a new update to your site didn’t affect tracking
• Verify a new aspect of your implementation is working correctly

But as much as we love our TagDebugger, it has its limitations. Your site is not just one page that changes occasionally—it’s hundreds if not thousands of pages that change often. Change is the reason analytics implementations break down, and you can’t possibly debug a critical mass of pages every time your website or implementation changes.

Which brings us to the third technique for debugging an analytics implementation.

3. Conducting an Automated Adobe Analytics Audit

Applying the word “debugging” to this final technique is a generous use of the term, considering how powerful an automated audit can be.

While your website will certainly change with time, the analytics data you hope to collect shouldn’t. Yes, you’ll collect more data as your analytics program matures, but once you start collecting data, you want to ensure you continue collecting the same data for the foreseeable future.

An automated Adobe Analytics audit does a few things, including:

• Verify your Adobe Analytics tags are present on each page
• Verify your variables are always present
• Validate each variable has the right data in the right format

The beauty of the audit is that you can configure it to run on a set schedule and notify you if anything is amiss. You’ll save time and rest easy knowing that if something goes wrong, you’ll quickly receive a notification so you can fix the error.

ObservePoint’s Technology Governance platform makes automated audits possible. Learn more about audits in the video below

Ensure Your Adobe Analytics Implementation Is Always Working

You spend a lot of time and money on Adobe Analytics, so you want to ensure you get the best return on your efforts. Regularly debugging and/or auditing your implementation can help you realize the return you’re hoping for.

If you’re interested in seeing the current state of your Adobe Analytics implementation across your site, schedule your free Adobe Analytics audit with an ObservePoint rep.

Related Posts

How to Interpret an Audit Report

March 19, 2024.

Getting to Know the ObservePoint Audit Report

March 18, 2024.

ObservePoint + NP Digital: How Digital Marketers Should Prepare for 3rd-Party Cookie Deprecation

March 11, 2024.

Does Your Site Work Without 3rd-Party Cookies?

February 29, 2024.

How to Use ObservePoint to Help You Navigate 3rd-Party Cookie Deprecation

February 27, 2024.

Goodbye 3rd-Party Cookies Pt. 2: Advertiser Perspectives

February 21, 2024.

Deciphering Adobe Analytics’s Mobile SDK Debug Output

Frederik Werner | Posted on March 1, 2020 |

Developing Mobile Applications is hard. Period. As a company offering Mobile Applications, you need to go to great length to develop Apps that don’t disappoint or annoy your customers, let alone engage them. New versions have to go through tedious testing, both from you and Google or Apple before any changes can be rolled out to your users. This is why accurate measurement of your Apps is crucial to making them successful and delivering value to your customers.

But this introduces a whole new layer of complexity. Now your developers not only need to make the App work but also need to implement Analytics into it. This can go two ways: Either they follow your tracking concept to the letter while not understanding the methodology and purpose behind it. Or you try to involve them more and make them understand why things are done in a specific way and how correct Analytics provide value to the company.

I think it’s quite clear that the second approach is the more mature one. It helps to propagate your mission and align the business with your goals. But now there is a new challenge: Testing the Analytics implementation has to be democratized to your developers. They need a way to get immediate feedback on how the App behaves in regards to Analytics, so they can fix any obvious bugs. This also helps to free up resources on QA and increase development quality.

There are some possibilities for developers to monitor Adobe Analytics requests in an App:

• Using a proxy like Charles or Fiddler. This involves monitoring network traffic and has become increasingly difficult with newer versions of Android and iOS due to security improvements.
• Using the Project Griffon Beta . Adobe has recognized the need for easier debugging and developed Project Griffon. It is a bit like the Experience Cloud Debugger for web and involves some changes to the code of your App. It is still in beta at time of writing.
• Utilizing Debug Output while development. This is the most direct way for your developers to get feedback. They will look at log output during development anyway. Logging is enabled with “MobileCore.setLogLevel(LoggingMode.DEBUG);” with the new Experience Cloud SDKs or “Config.setDebugLogging(true);” on the 4.x SKDs (or the iOS equivalent).

Since the last method is the most intuitive and direct way for developers to get feedback, we will focus on that way. Once Debug Logging is enabled, Android Studio or Xcode will print Log lines in the console, telling us what’s happening in the SDK. An Adobe Analytics logline will look like this:

So, if we filter our console with “Analytics – Request Queued”, we will only see the Analytics requests that are fired on a specific action, like below:

It’s quite obvious what those lines mean. The part in brackets contains the actual request parameters in an URL-encoded string. When we want to read it more clearly, we can throw it in an URL prettyprinter to get a more readable version like below:

The developers can now compare those variables to what you gave them in the tracking concept. Any deviations can be addressed immediately without any external involvement.

But this might get very cumbersome when every requests needs to be handled individually. To make this more manageable, I quickly put together a tool to streamline the process for our specific usecase.

The Adobe Analytics Mobile SDK Debug Parser

I wanted a way to pretty print multiple lines of debug output, at once, in a flexible way. So I came up with a single page HTML and JS app to do exactly that, you can find it here: https://www.fullstackanalyst.io/analytics_log_parser.html (Link also on top and bottom of this website). And since I am not much of a frontend developer, I put it in a Github Repo to allow contributions of more talented people than myself. Here is a quick rundown on the features:

• Easy Workflow: Just paste all your Analytics Requests in the Textbox and hit the button to get a nice table with all Requests in an understandable way.
• Built for Adobe Analytics: Columns are highlighted according to the variable type (Context Variables vs. SDK Variables vs. Normal Variables).
• Layout options: Columns can be rearranged by drag-and-drop or hidden individually or in Groups.
• Sorting options: Sort rows by clicking the column header.
• Search: Simple search to filter table by keyword.
• Export options: Export the table as CSV, Excel, or PDF, copy it to the clipboard or print it.
• Row highlighting: Highlight single or multiple rows by clicking them (with ctrl or shift for multiple).

Given that this tool is built for myself, I tested it on my machine (Chrome on Windows) to get everything running. If some things don’t work for you, try fixing it and submit a pull request on Github! As always: No guarantees on functionality and availability, use at your own risk!

German Analyst and Data Scientist working in and writing about (Web) Analytics and Online Marketing Tech.

2021&2022 Adobe Analytics Champion

EMEA Adobe Analytics User Group Lead

Other cool posts:

• Migrating from Android’s BroadcastReceiver to Google Play Install Referrer API with Adobe Analytics Adobe Analytics can track not only websites, but mobile apps just the same. This is achieved by using the Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SKDs for native iOS and Android apps. One very interesting part of tracking mobile apps is known as acquisition tracking, which looks at how users found the...
• Importing Organic Google Search data to Adobe Analytics with a single script Some time ago, I published an article explaining how to get Google Search performance data from the Google Search Console to Adobe Analytics. For that post, I explained to query the Google Search API, write the result to an Adobe Analytics Data Source file, and upload it to Adobe Analytics....
• Trying out the new Adobe Analytics App Adobe Analytics still is the most complete solution for Digital Analytics. But for years, there has been one thing missing: A mature way to use dashboards on the go, without using your computer. While Analytics is usable on mobile browsers on a technical level, it is not the best user...

Debugging Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics can sometimes be a bit of an enigma, so people often turn to browser extensions to help them with debugging Adobe Analytics. However, for those of us who spend most of our lives in browser tools; there’s a simple way to get x-ray vision into what Analytics is thinking.

Let’s get straight down to business! Open your browser tools and select the console view.

Paste in the below code…

Now refresh the page… you can now basically hear every thought Adobe Analytics is having during the page load and as the user interacts with the page. For example:

SATELLITE: detected click on INPUT

SATELLITE: detected locationchange on #document

You can now start debugging Adobe Analytics on any page, with a single line of code.

Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and six-time Microsoft MVP for developer technologies. He’s a Software Punk and writer.

Categories:

Reacting to Clarity insights

Analytics are lossy and that's okay.

Adobe Experience Platform Debugger

Debug Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Experience Cloud products using the Adobe Experience Platform Debugger

The new Adobe Experience Platform Debugger helps to debug Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Experience Cloud products. The new Debugger includes everything you love in the previous debugger plus these new features: Fresh-yet-familiar design Enjoy a debugging experience that feels more intuitive and natural. More space to debug The new navigation bar auto-collapses when Debugger get too small to ensure you have enough space to debug. See your data layer in action See data layer changes on a timeline alongside every Adobe network call to more easily debug your data. Understand your data layer Toggle the diff viewer to see how your data layer evolves across the event timeline. Freely Flip through tabs Click the Lock icon to stay connected to the current tab in focus without losing the context of the page you’re debugging. Implementation health at your fingertips See in-context implementation health checks powered by Adobe Experience Platform Auditor so ensure your Adobe implementations are healthy. More flexible Launch and DTM testing Inject Launch embed codes, or replace or block both DTM and Launch embed codes. Easy on the eyes Go to settings to toggle between dark- and light-mode.

3.5 out of 5 23 ratings Google doesn't verify reviews. Learn more about results and reviews.

Sebastian Dernbach Mar 21, 2024

Could you please fix the error that is always shown in the console? "Unchecked runtime.lastError: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist." Looks like your event sending via ports is not working correctly.

Alison Smith Oct 31, 2023

Used to work (for analytics debugging). Now it doesn't The old Experience CLOUD debugger worked great. Then Adobe added new features (bloat) to create this new Experience Platform Debugger and now you have to scroll down, past all the unwanted detail to get to the actual data you're interested in (page name, eVars, props, etc). There's no filter or sort available, so just endless scrolling. Then (Sep 2023) they added a (unwanted) 'Jump to most recent' button and broke it completely. It cu... Show more

Phillip Marquez Jul 7, 2023

When this extension is running, it inserts several <script> tags BEFORE the <head> tag which seems to break tags that are loaded after this happens if they are using the insertBefore() method (which most tags do). The result is half of our tags from Data Collection get loaded and the rest just silently fail. Disable the extension and they all load perfectly fine. This is unfortunate since the only thing I find useful with this extension is being able to load a specific library for testing.... Show more

• Version 1.5.4
• Updated December 20, 2023
• Report a concern
• Offered by Adobe Inc.
• Size 1.93MiB
• Languages English
• Developer Adobe Inc. 345 Park Ave San Jose, CA 95110 US Email [email protected]
• Trader This developer has identified itself as a trader per the definition from the European Union.

Adobe Experience Platform Debugger has disclosed the following information regarding the collection and usage of your data. More detailed information can be found in the developer's privacy policy .

Adobe Experience Platform Debugger handles the following:

This developer declares that your data is.

• Not being sold to third parties, outside of the approved use cases
• Not being used or transferred for purposes that are unrelated to the item's core functionality
• Not being used or transferred to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes

AEM Chrome Extension - SourcedCode

AEM Chrome Extension for AEM Content Authors, Developers, and CMS Admins for the AEM platform, all versions of AEM + AEMaaaCS.

MiaProva facilitates organizational scale and visibility into optimization programs. This extension is for Adobe Target end users.

Digital Data Viewer (DDV)

View, filter and save Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager (XDM / Alloy) data from developer tools.

AEM Sidekick

AEM Sidekick allows authors of AEM sites to easily preview and publish content.

Adobe Experience Cloud Bookmarks

Bookmarks to Adobe Experience Cloud: Analytics, AEP Data Collection Tags (formerly Launch), Target, Campaign, AEM and other products

Debugger for Adobe Analytics

Prints to JavaScript console what data is sent to Adobe Analytics.

Launch and DTM Switch

Enables the developer to locally override the embedded Launch or DTM library for testing.

Activity Map

View key site metrics in an intuitive visual format.

Tealium Tools

Enhance your Tealium implementations by evaluating your website data and tags through a variety of helpful tools.

ObservePoint TagDebugger

Troubleshoot and audit analytics tags, variables and on-click events. Supports Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Ensighten and more

Adobe Experience Cloud Visual Editing Helper

The Visual Editing Helper extension allows users to load their website into Adobe Target or Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Debug and test tag management (Google Tag Manager, DTM, Tealium) and analytics implementations.

Sign in to Community

Sign in to view all badges

Expand my Community achievements bar.

Adobe Analytics

Is anyone using omnibug (chrome extension).

• Mark as New
• Subscribe to RSS Feed

Solved! Go to Solution.

Total Likes

View solution in original post

• All forum topics
• Previous Topic

• Certifications
• Instructor-led training
• View all learning options

Documentation

• Documentation home
• Experience Cloud release notes
• Document Cloud release notes
• Community home
• Community Advisors
• Experience League Showcase
• Advertising
• Audience Manager
• Campaign Classic v7 & Campaign v8
• Campaign Standard
• Experience Cloud
• Experience Manager Sites & More
• Experience Platform
• Journey Optimizer
• Real-Time Customer Data Platform
• Creative Cloud
• Document Cloud
• Marketo Engage
• Experience Cloud support
• Document Cloud support
• Community forums
• Adobe Developer
• Adobe status

Adobe account

• Log in to your account
• Corporate responsibility
• Investor Relations
• Supply chain
• Trust Center
• Diversity & Inclusion
• COVID-19 Responses