Learn how automation can help you handle the ever-increasing complexity of digital analytics tracking in this eBook.

1. ORDER vs CHAOS
Taming Digital Analytics Complexity With Automation

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Table of Contents
Introduction
You Need to Test
Build or Purchase an Automated Testing Solution
Implement Your Automated Testing Solution
Benefits of Automated Testing
Establish Analytics Order and Move Your Business Forward
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INTRODUCTION
As the world of digital analytics moves forward, tracking customer behavior becomes more
and more sophisticated, making the processes involved in collecting accurate customer data
increasingly complex.
This complexity comes largely from the fact that companies create extensively complicated
analytics implementations in an effort to track vast amounts of customer data across their
digital properties, and then these companies struggle to manage and maintain their imple-
mentations over time because of the following:
So, what can companies do to manage the complexity involved in maintaining accurate data?
The answer: Automated analytics testing.
Ever-changing websites and analytics implementations. Websites and their
associated analytics implementations change frequently, creating a moving target
for analytics professionals.
Disorganized analytics tagging. Robust analytics implementations are large and
complex, often containing thousands of tags, which opens the door for potential tagging
disorganization if analytics professionals aren’t careful.
Team misalignment. When teams don’t communicate effectively, their implementation
can become misconfigured and data integrity suffers as a result. A change made by one
team can break a requirement of another.

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Analytics testing is the process of auditing the analytics
implementation associated with your website or mobile
app to ensure your tracking meets expectations and
collects the right data. Regularly testing your analytics
implementation is critical to maintaining accurate data
on an ongoing basis.
There are two primary methods of conducting
analytics testing:
Through manual testing
Through test automation
Manually testing an analytics implementation is the
lesser of the two options and generally involves using
the developer tools in your browser to inspect individ-
ual tags on your site to make sure they are meeting
your expectations. This process requires using human
effort to comb through lines and lines of code, verifying
analytics tags one-by-one.
Manual analytics testing is highly time-intensive and prone
to human error, as the tedious nature of manual testing
leads people to regularly miss analytics tracking errors
that negatively impact accuracy and customer experienc-
es. Additionally, as digital analytics tracking increases in
complexity, manually validating analytics implementations
becomes harder and more time-consuming.
However, there are times when manual testing is appro-
priate. For example, if you’re testing the tracking on a cus-
tomer journey that will only be run one or two times, or if
the nature of your test is extremely dynamic, you would
not want to take the time and resources to set up an auto-
mated test of that journey.
Setting up automated testing for that journey would likely
take longer than simply testing the journey manually.
Still, due to the cumbersome and error-prone nature
of manual analytics tracking, we recommend minimiz-
ing this route wherever possible. In most cases, you will
be better off utilizing an automated testing solution like
ObservePoint, but you need to weigh the needs of each
testing situation individually.
You Need to Test
These two testing strategies are not created equal.
Let’s dive into each separately.
Manual Testing

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The complexity involved with analytics tracking doesn’t
have to keep you from obtaining reliable insights, especial-
ly since this complexity becomes manageable when you
apply test automation to your analytics implementation.
The goal of automated testing is to continually test the
functionality of each component of your analytics imple-
mentation to ensure you obtain valuable insights from ac-
curate data on an ongoing basis.
More specifically, the process of utilizing test automation
for analytics data entails the use of automated audits to
run against your analytics implementation following a
change. These audits check for tracking errors such as
missing tags, missing variable data, incorrect formatting of
variable data, and other errors. A fundamental piece to
discovering these errors involves setting up tests—called
Rules in ObservePoint—within your solution that allow
you to compare and evaluate individual elements of your
implementation to make sure your expectations are being
met at the tag, variable, and variable-value level.
Regularly performing these tests will help you ensure the
integrity of your implementation by systematically scanning
your website pages for tagging errors to ensure accurate
data collection.
In order to effectively utilize an automated testing solution,
you need to complete a couple of steps.
1. Build or purchase an automated testing solution
2. Implement your automated testing solution with the
following best practices:
Target your analytics testing
Use monitoring and alerts
Train and align your teams on your analytics testing strategy
Synchronize tests with implementation updates
Automated Testing
What you need to do
Let’s jump into each of these steps.

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Obviously, if you want to engage in automated testing, you
need a testing solution. Your options here are to either
build an automated testing solution yourself or purchase
a pre-existing third-party option like ObservePoint.
Due to the labor-intensive nature of building and main-
taining an automated testing solution yourself, you’re
likely better off finding a pre-existing solution, especially
since you will be able to configure and customize a well-
made automated testing solution to your specific needs
at a much quicker rate than you could ever build one.
Also, with a third-party solution, you don’t have to worry
about having someone on your team maintaining and up-
dating that solution as you move your business forward.
Additionally, with a third-party solution, the third party
takes care of all the needs of your users. An adequate
third party solution provider will have extensive resources
dedicated to supporting your users so your users get the
most out of your solution. The third-party will even help
you get buy-in from others in your organization.
Regardless of your choice between building and buying,
once you have your solution up and running, you will need
to set up testing processes to ensure your analytics imple-
mentation is collecting accurate data on an ongoing basis.
These processes are outlined in the remaining steps.
Build or Purchase an Automated Testing Solution
Building a solution yourself is possible but is also a task of
serious magnitude, as doing so would require individuals
with comprehensive expertise in data collection, process-
ing, and querying. You would also need to consider how to
incorporate functional visualization, UX/UI, notifications,
and reporting functionality.
Additionally, if you build your own solution, you will have to
deal with the extensive burden of training. You will have to
train and support all the individuals who use the solution,
and essentially sell your solution to different teams in order
to get company-wide buy-in. The people in your organiza-
tion involved with using the solution basically become your
customers, and those people need to be supported, which
will require a significant amount of time and resources.
Also, even if you were able to build a solution, you would
need to dedicate manpower to updating and maintaining
that solution over time so the solution continues to ade-
quately serve your needs as time goes on.
Undoubtedly, you would need to dedicate extensive man-
hours and resources to the creation, customization, and
maintenance of such a solution.
Build your own solution
Purchase a third-party solution
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Once you have an automated testing solution at your
disposal, you’ll want to strategically deploy it to yield the
greatest benefit. Here are some tips to get you started. You need to regularly keep tabs on your implementation.
As a result, you should use an automated testing solu-
tion to set up monitoring and alerting to regularly scan
your site’s analytics implementation and alert you when
something goes wrong. With the help of integrations, you
can configure these alerts to notify you of errors through
your preferred means of communication, whether that be
through email, Slack, text, or in-app notifications.
By using monitoring and alerts, you can verify the integrity
of your analytics solution is preserved on an ongoing basis.
Once you have your solution and processes in place by
going through the previous steps, you’ll want to train and
align your team members around those processes.
Implement Your Automated Testing Solution
A key way to ensure accurate data over time is to target
your analytics testing. You have critical, high-traffic pages
and user journeys on your site, and testing these high-traf-
fic elements needs to take precedence over testing other
site elements. With an automated testing solution, you
should prioritize testing on these pages and user paths
by focusing frequent scans on these critical site elements.
As a rough guideline, you should prioritize running daily
testing on your top 5-10 critical customer experiences,
but you could easily have more than that if your site is
especially large. Just remember that tests require mainte-
nance of their own, so the more tests you run, the more
you have to maintain.
Target Your Analytics Testing
Use Monitoring and Alerts

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Luckily, an effective automated testing solution will help
you align communication between your teams. An ade-
quate solution will allow you to accomplish the following:
Configure notification settings to alert and align
team members on problems as they arise.
Create data owners who are responsible for specific
aspects of the data collection process.
Use permissions to keep unauthorized employees
from messing with data.
Train and Align Your Teams On Your
Analytics Testing Strategy
Synchronize Tests With
Implementation Updates
For automated testing to be effective for your organization,
you need to train and align your teams around processes
and practices that ensure accurate data. You do yourself
no favors if you obtain a testing solution, put a bunch of
analytics processes in place, and then fail to organize and
optimize the manpower behind those processes.
The last step involves synchronizing your tests with up-
dates (also known as release validation). Release validation
is the practice of running timely tests after making changes
to your website and/or the associated analytics implemen-
tation. To maintain accurate data on an ongoing basis, you
should conduct regular release validation as your site and
analytics implementation go through updates.
Additionally, to ensure ongoing alignment, you’ll want to
appoint a data champion with company clout (prefera-
bly someone on the C-level) who can be the driving force
behind your analytics testing strategy and give you the
support you need.
A well-rounded automated testing solution will allow you
to schedule—or better yet, trigger—automatic tests when-
ever you make changes to your analytics implementation
or website, which will help you quickly resolve potential
errors before they impact your data or your customers.
Now, keep in mind that automated testing isn’t a silver bul-
let, as you still have to deal with maintaining your testing
solution and continually calibrating your tests. But overall,
the benefits of automated testing far outweigh the costs.
Once you accomplish the aforementioned steps, you put
yourself in a position to reap all the benefits of using an
automated testing solution.

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Let’s break down each of these benefits individually.
Change is an inevitable part of managing websites and
analytics implementations, and an automated test-
ing solution will allow you to monitor the integrity of
your analytics implementation through each and every
change as time goes on.
Tagging can get messy, especially with large, complex im-
plementations. An automated testing solution will help
you ensure all the tags on your site are in the appropriate
place and functioning properly, and you can be notified
whenever your tagging goes sour.
You will also be able to ensure your site is complying
with regulations and protecting your customers, as an
automated testing solution can help you quickly find and
eliminate any rogue or piggybacking tags on your site that
could be compromising your data.
Benefits of Automated Testing
Effectively using an automated testing solution will
help you:
Manage the ever-changing nature of websites
and analytics implementations
Use site-wide tag governance to monitor
tags and comply with regulations
Gain ongoing confidence in your analytics
data for decision-making
Align teams around your analytics
testing strategy
Save time and resources
Increase your data quality
Manage the ever-changing
nature of websites and analytics
implementations
Use site-wide tag governance to
monitor tags and comply with
regulations

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Managing an analytics strategy is a dynamic process with
lots of moving parts, which creates opportunities for mis-
communication and misalignment between teams. An
automated testing solution will help you align teams and
eliminate potential miscommunication by allowing you to
set up data owners, user permissions, and notifications.
Using an automated testing solution frees you from having
to expend manual effort on monitoring your implementa-
tion. As a result, you’ll save time and human energy that
can be spent on increasing your analytics testing capacity—
helping you obtain even more accurate insights—or other
important initiatives that will move your business forward.
Through automated testing, you can quickly obtain knowl-
edge about the status of analytics tags on your site, in-
cluding if any tags, variables, or values are missing or if du-
plicate tags are present. These tests allow you to quickly
discover errors in your implementation and ensure data
quality on an ongoing basis.
By increasing your data accuracy and saving time and re-
sources, you are able to more fully dedicate your teams
to understanding your customers. In turn, this greater
understanding allows your company to confidently serve
your customers through customized experiences.
Align teams around your
analytics strategy
Save time and resources
Increase your data quality
Gain conf idence in your analytics
data for decision-making

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Establish Analytics Order and
Move Your Business Forward
Utilizing an automated testing solution makes the sheer complexity of a robust analytics implementation manageable,
especially because these testing solutions help teams hit the moving target of an ever-changing analytics implementation.
Ultimately, the chaos associated with managing an analytics implementation can be transformed into order with the help of
an automated testing solution, as these solutions allow you to put your focus into creating more accurate data and moving
your business forward with other priorities.
Schedule Demo
To find out how ObservePoint’s automated testing solution can help you bring order to
your digital analytics practice, schedule a demo today.