Running a dataLayer audit (QA)

Before you start

You need two things in place in your project. First, the Tag Insight snippet must be installed on your site: open Install Tag Insight in the sidebar and place the snippet before the closing </head> tag. Second, you need a tracking plan to audit against. You can manage plans under Tracking plan > Tracking plans, or generate one from your existing site with Detect tracking plan, the Reverse Tracking Plan feature. If your team keeps shared definitions (events, properties, parameters, event types) in the Library, your plan can reuse them across projects.

Launch an audit

1. 1

   In the sidebar, open Tracking plan, then Audits.

2. 2

   Start a new audit and select the tracking plan you want to validate against.

3. 3

   Let the audit run. Tag Insight compares the dataLayer events it captures with the events, properties and parameters defined in your plan.

Audits are unlimited on every plan, so run them as often as you need: after each release is a good habit. If you prefer to test pages while browsing them yourself, the Tag Insight Chrome extension includes a QA DataLayer feature that works even without a tag management system.

Read the Overview and Error distribution

When the audit finishes, start with the Overview. It gives you the overall health of the run at a glance: how much of what was captured matches your tracking plan.

Next, open Error distribution. This view shows where problems concentrate, so you can prioritize. A single misconfigured event template often explains a large share of errors, and fixing it first clears the most noise.

Work through the results list

Below the summary views, the results list details each result from the run. Go through it to identify missing events, unexpected values, and properties that do not match the plan. If you need to see the raw hits behind a result, open Live Debugger in the sidebar: it lets you view the hits captured during an audit run.

Once a run has been reviewed and its issues are fixed or logged, archive it. Archived audits stay available in the Audits section, so you keep your history without cluttering the list of active runs.

Schedule recurring audits

Manual audits catch problems after the fact. Schedules catch regressions before anyone notices broken data. The Audits section includes schedules and a calendar, where you set up recurring runs against your tracking plan. Scheduled runs also appear in the Calendar module in the sidebar, giving you a single view of upcoming and past audit activity for the project.

A common setup is a weekly scheduled audit plus a manual run after every significant release. Review the Overview of each scheduled run, dig into Error distribution when something drifts, and archive runs you have processed.