[UA] Check your tag setup [Legacy]

Make sure you're collecting data and seeing it in your reports.
You are viewing a legacy article about Universal Analytics. Learn more about Google Analytics 4 replacing Universal Analytics.

If you’re not sure your Google Analytics tag is working correctly, try one of the options below to check your setup.

In this article:

Check your Real-Time reports

The Real-Time reports let you see current activity on your site. If these reports have data, then your snippet is collecting data and sending it to Analytics as expected.

The Real-Time Overview and Behavior reports let you see activity for specific pages. If you haven’t added the snippet to all pages on your site, you can check these reports to see whether the snippet is sending data from the pages you have tagged. These reports show activity for only the most active pages, so they don’t provide an exhaustive assessment, but they’re a good signal that your snippet is working correctly.

To see the Real-Time reports:

  1. Sign in to your Analytics account.
  2. Navigate to a view in the property to which you added the snippet. If you only recently added the snippet to this property (website), it is likely that there will only be one view.
  3. Open Reporting.
  4. Select Real-Time > Overview
You can use the Behavior > Site Content reports to check pages that don’t appear in the Real-Time reports, but keep in mind that it takes 24-48 hours to process the data for non-real-time reports.

Use Google Tag Assistant to verify your setup

Google Tag Assistant is a free Chrome browser extension that shows you whether Google Analytics tags (the snippet) are firing correctly. Tag Assistant lets you record a user journey on your site, and then see a report of all the hits sent during that journey and whether there were any errors associated with sending those hits.

The image below shows an example of the kinds of errors that Tag Assistant reveals:

GTR Errors and Warnings
Google Tag Assistant Recordings alerts

See an example of a Tag Assistant report.

Learn more about installing Google Tag Assistant and recording a user journey.

 

Troubleshoot your tag setup

If you don't see data in your Analytics account, or you see a significant drop in number of sessions, try this troubleshooter.

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Check out google.com/analytics/learn, a new resource to help you get the most out of Google Analytics 4. The new website includes videos, articles, and guided flows, and provides links to the Google Analytics Discord, Blog, YouTube channel, and GitHub repository.

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