Google’s new Tag Assistant is available only in Chrome right now, but it’s a handy tool. Once you install it, it sits like a small tag in the upper right hand corner of your toolbar till you click on it. Click on it and you’ll see a pop-up window that tells you what Google scripts are on the page you’re looking at — in this case, the new site we’ve just launched for Pushcart Players, Google Analytics is the only tag installed.
Tag Assistant will also show if you have Adwords, Tag Manager, and so forth installed.
So far, it seems like just a quick way to find out which sites have Analytics or Adwords; barring a really special sort of curiosity, that’s not going to be super useful to most of us.
There’s more, though.
Our Tag Assistant for Pushcart is green because it’s perfect — no errors, no updates needed. The tag for FreshPlans, our lab site, is blue. Our Google Analytics was correctly installed, but there have been some updates in the code and changes in best practices since we launched, so Google tells us that we have no errors and that’s it’s working — but the blue lettering of “working” lets us know that we can click through for some syntax improvements. The green “working” next to our installation of Tag Manager shows that it’s fine.
We have another little lab site, Almost Outside, and you can see that its tag is red:
It has errors, multiple installations of Google Analytics, and one installation that isn’t even working. We don’t see these errors in Webmaster Tools, either.
There is also a yellow tag state between blue and red, but we ran out of sites to play with 😉
If you have a large site where you’ve installed different tags on each page, this little tool could really save you time with troubleshooting. It’s free and harmless, so you might want to install it even if you don’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting or don’t have that complex a website — it never hurts to check.
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