#Charles vs proxyman install
#Charles vs proxyman full
#Charles vs proxyman android

#Charles vs proxyman install

Measurement Protocol hits generated from a local Apache install running server-side tracking code.

#Charles vs proxyman android

Mobile tracking from an Android development kit running in an emulator.

Mobile tracking from Android and iPhone apps.

Web traffic from Android and iPhone browsers.

The team at Bounteous has used Charles to inspect Google Analytics hits from some of the following sources: Perhaps the most useful feature of Charles is that it can proxy traffic any source, not just from the browser where you already have your dev tools and your extensions installed. You will need to figure out on your own the remote and local paths that need remapping, but the interface for the remote URL is the same as in the Map Remote tips, above. You can use Map Local to test changes to this file by saving the file, modifying it, and using Charles to direct requests to the original file to instead point to the modified version on your hard drive. This was more common before tag management solutions become popular, but some websites still use it to load data into the Data Layer on page load. Many websites have a “helper file” or “library file” with analytics helper functions installed.

Where the “Map Remote” feature of Charles points a request from one URL to a different URL, the “Map Local” makes a request to a remote URL to instead return a file on your own hard drive. This same principle also works with other Tag Management solutions such as Tealium and Ensighten. This is somewhat less useful now that Workspaces exist, but can be useful if you are pushing against the Workspace limit in your container.

#Charles vs proxyman full

Having a full record of the hits that were generated allows you to drill down into the cause of errors, even if you didn’t notice them at the time.īy modifying the target URL, you can also cause the request to serve specific versions or environments in GTM. This is most useful when you need to wait for Google Analytics to process data, such as when doing QA on Enhanced Ecommerce implementations. Session RecordingĪfter navigating around a site and generating a bucketload of hits, you can save it and open it back up in Charles later. Pro-tip 3: The hit response can be copied and pasted into Excel. If this is the case, the hit will have a “Body” tab next to the “Query String” tab. Pro-tip 2: For very large hits (such as ecommerce hits with large shopping carts), the hit parameters will be sent in the body of the request instead of as query parameters. Pro-tip 1: If there are multiple Google Analytics beacons on the page, you can use your UA number as the search string instead of “google-analytics” to find what’s being sent to each one. You can easily go back and forth and compare values between hits for consistency. This immediately allows us to check simple data integrity issues, like “What property am I sending data to?” and “are any custom dimensions being set, and to what value?”Īs you navigate around a website, Charles will continue to parse and record all the hits that you generate. With that resource in hand, we can see that the above hit is a pageview hit (t parameter) to the Bounteous homepage (dl parameter), and we can see the value of my Google cookie (cid parameter) and what property the data is being sent to (tid parameter). In order to interpret these hit values, you have to refer to the documentation for the Measurement Protocol. The biggest downside to using Charles compared to integrated tools is that Charles does not label these parameters with what they represent to Google Analytics.

Traffic between your browser and the Internet gets directed through Charles, letting you inspect, record, or modify any and all traffic.

How It WorksĬharles Proxy is a proxy server running on your local machine. But because it is general-purpose, it works in a variety of situations that specialized tools sometimes don’t handle. Charles is a heavy-duty, all-purpose tool that is not specialized to web analytics, which means that it takes extra set-up to use. If you find anything that looks odd in your data, your first step should be to look at the hit data so you can figure out whether the source of the issue is the on-page tracking or the processing that happens on Google’s servers.Ĭharles Proxy is a hit-inspection tool that has proven valuable to us here at Bounteous. The ultimate source of truth for a Google Analytics implementation is being able to see the hits coming out of the web page, and seeing what values are being sent to Google Analytics. In order to use data, you need to be able to trust it. While it may be inglorious, debugging is an important part of web analytics.