Important: This article only applies to Google Universal Analytics. For Google Analytics 4, see Confirm Account ID Free Edition Data Flow in Google Analytics 4.
Context
A good practice is to monitor whether Google Analytics (GA) receives sufficient account ID data to build an accurate composite profile of visitors to your website. As well, you might need to inspect the GA integration and the websites of companies that visit your site for other issues. You want to ensure that GA receives reliable information about the firmographic attributes that you selected.
This article also outlines some steps that can help troubleshoot problems that can compromise the reliability of web traffic data as reported in GA.
The procedures in this article address how you can diagnose various issues:
- You can measure the health of your Demandbase integration by creating a GA segment that monitors how often GA doesn’t receive firmographic information from visitors to your website. The segment that measures how frequently Demandbase data isn’t transmitted to GA is called Audience None.
- You can use the GA debugger to view what data is sent to which GA property. This helps spot setup issues with the distribution of data to properties.
- Inspect websites of your customers to verify the correct attributes are set up in the field map.
- Determine how many GA properties populate a page of a customer website.
Steps: Set Up and View the Audience None Segment
View this video for a walk-through of how to create an Audience None segment in GA. The steps are also documented below.
Step 1: Add the Audience None Segment
1.1. Navigate to your GA reporting view.
1.2. On the left navigation bar, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
1.3. Click Add Segment at the top.
1.4. Create a new segment called Audience None per the configuration in the following screenshot (select Conditions > Audience attribute > matches regex from drop-down list > enter .+ in text box > Exclude from the Filter drop-down list > click Save).
1.5. Click Add Segment again at the top of the report.
1.6. Make sure All Users and Audience Not Equal to None are checked from the following screen and click Apply.
Step 2: Make adjustments
2.1. Confirm All Users and Audience None appear as the two segments at the top of the page. Make sure All Users is on the left and Audience None on the right. If they both don't appear, click on the Choose segment from list and add them.
2.2. Confirm that the date range of the report covers a time period after you went live with the Demandbase GA integration.
Step 3: View the percentage of pageviews
The percentage of pageviews from the Audience None segment represents the amount of Demandbase data that was not collected by GA.
Tip: As a general guideline, an Audience None segment percentage below 10 percent indicates that the Demandbase integration with GA is successful. The 10 percent benchmark applies because an Account ID Free Edition implementation measures firmographic attributes for no more than 25,000 unique website visitors per month.
Steps: Verify Demandbase Data Flows to the Correct GA Properties
1. Use the Google Analytics Debugger to verify what data is received.
2. Confirm the data is directed to the appropriate property.
Steps: Identify the Attribute Setup in the Field Map
1. Open a page of the customer website in Google Chrome.
2. Right-click on the page and select Inspect.
3. Click the Sources tab.
4. Go to scripts.demandbase.com in the navigation tree and click the first file. (Each customer’s file is unique but it should be a combination of 8 numbers and letters).
5. Click the curly brackets at bottom of the window.
6. Under the code line that reads as analytics; { you can see a field map that lists the attributes and the custom dimensions where we send the data.
Steps: Determine Number of GA Properties that Populate a Customer Web Page
1. Open a page of the customer's website in Google Chrome.
2. Right-click the page and select Inspect to open the Developer Console.
3. Set the Console tab to top view.
4. Copy the code on https://jsfiddle.net/kaqw3asb/ and paste it in the console (next to the blue cursor).
5. Press Enter/Return on your keyboard. The returned result indicates what properties are on the page.