UPDATE: This post was updated to show Google’s replacement of the DFA Utility Pane by the Google Tag Assistant.

Google Tag Assistant

For those of you who were fans of the DFA Utility Pane that was previously used as the Chrome Floodlight Tag Checker, there is a new extension by Google that does even more!

The Google Tag Assistant is an extension that helps troubleshoot installation of various Google tags, including DoubleClick floodlights, Google Analytics, AdWords conversion and remarketing, and Google Tag Manager. Using a small tag icon on your toolbar (icon pictured below), Tag Assistant helps verify that the right tags are on the page, and implemented correctly. Our team here at Booyah uses this tool consistently to make sure that things are running smoothly with tracking.

Here’s how it works. After installing the extension, just navigate to the desired page that you would like to check. The tag icon will indicate the status of the tags on the page using the following:

• Gray icon with an ‘x’: no code was found on the page
• Green: a valid tag was found. The number in the icon indicates the number of tags found.
• Blue: there are suggestions on improving overall tagging health
• Yellow: a tag was found with minor implementation issues
• Red: a tag was found with critical implementation issues

If you click on the tag icon, it will open a window containing the tag details. At the top of the window, it shows the number of Google tags found as well as the number of errors found on the page. Each tag on the page is listed under the “status” section, where you can click on the status drop-down to see what exactly is wrong with your tag, if anything. The window will then navigate to the Google help center for further troubleshooting. In addition to this, the Google Tag Assistant will also make suggestions when improvements can be made in either the tags themselves or the implementation (i.e. outdated tags, placement of code in the tag, etc).

The Google Tag Assistant is a great tool to use to check for tag errors and make certain that you are getting useful information about your live tags, all without scrolling through pages of source code.

Find out more information about the Tag Assistant here, or if you’d like to know more about how we can help you track efficiently, feel free to contact us!