When I test a SCITYLANA implementation for one of our customers I start out by checking the front page of the site in question and investigate what is sent to Google Analytics.
I expect to find a custom dimension with a special SCITYLANA value set. We say it’s tagged with SCITYLANA. In this post I will describe how I would check the implementation on scitylana.com (our own site)
I know we are using custom dimension index 1 (cd1) for the SCITYLANA tag (you can find your index in either your data extraction config or in the GA Admin). So I expect to find a hit sent to GA with a URL parameter containg a structure like
cd1: sl=1u=...&t=...
The … is just representing some value that we don’t care about in this context. So please ignore it for now.
To investigate I will use Google Chrome. So I open up Chrome at https://www.scitylana.com
I press F12 and get access to the Developer Toolbar. The toolbar consist of multiple tabs. One called Network, which i’ll select.
I write analytics.com/collect in the filter.
I click on the first request/hit in the list. And scroll down to the bottom on the right hand side. I get this view…
Now I see the line marked in yellow where I can see the the SCITYLANA tag is set in custom dimension 1 (cd1)
Now I will check the second hit sent to GA the same way.
Next: Test special events
We have scroll tracking enabled on our site so I would need to ensure that the hit sent on scrolling past a section on the page is also tagged with the SCITYLANA custom dimension value.
After scrolling past a section on the page the site sent another GA hit. And I can see that the hit has the SCITYLANA tag set.
But what if the SCITYLANA tag wasn’t set?
You can implement the SCITYLANA tag primarily in 2 ways
GTM (Universal Analytics tags)
You need to ensure that ALL your Universal Analytics tags has the SCITYLANA custom dimension set.
SCITYLANA GA tracking plugin
You need to identify all the Universal Analytics tracking scripts you have on your site. Maybe you have multiple “master” templates each having a copy of the Universal Analytics tracking script. Make sure the SCITYLANA GA tracking plugin is in place in all templates.
Maybe your site is hosted on different platforms. A blog on wordpress and support on Zendesk etc. Add the SCITYLANA GA tracking plugin code everywhere.
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