Ongoing monitoring of tags is a crucial final step to any solid Tag Governance process. After all, you need to be aware of any data collection and tracking issues as soon as they arise in order to ensure complete and accurate reporting within analytics and media platforms.
To be notified of any of these issues in real-time, Tag Inspector Alerts can be configured for any Validation Rule created within your Realtime account. These allow you to be notified within a specified period of time, any tag dropping off the site or specific data point no longer being collected according to your specifications. Below, we explore the functionality and configuration options of the Realtime Validation Alerts.
Validation Alerts are attached to any and all Validation Rules created within Tag Inspector Realtime. Simply create the Validation Rule and then add an alert so you and your team can be notified in real-time of any tagging issues arising on your site.
In the above example, the Alert is applied to a rule looking for Google Tag Manager firing on all pages of a website. To set this alert up, the following options must be set:
Alert Name - Give a name to the Alert to easily identify.
Description - Insert a description of the Validation Rule being tested. This will be viewable in the alert notification to easily understand what has broken.
Rule to Test - Select the Validation Rule that should be evaluated for the Alert. This is the rule that will trigger the alert when the failure rate passes the defined threshold.
Alert If - Select the threshold of failure at which you would like to be alerted. The most common option here is to be alerted when the Failure Rate of the selected rule is more than 10%. Also define the time frame of validations that should be evaluated. In the example above 12 hours is selected. What this means is that the system will look at all validations for the selected rule over the past 12 hours. If the failure rate of those validations is above 10% then the Alert will be activated.
Emails - Input the emails of who should be alerted.
Check This Condition Every - Here you select how frequently you would like the system to check the Alert Status. This is the time interval at which the system will check the status of the Alert. If an Alert is in an “alert state” when the status is checked, emails will be sent to those selected in the previous option.
Example: Using the logic in the Alert configuration pictured above as a reference: The Validation Rule “Google Tag Manager Loads” will run on all page loads of a website looking for a Google Tag Manager to fire. Whenever GTM does not fire, the rule will fail. Our Alert, “Google Tag Manager Loads”, will look at the Failure Rate of the rule for all validations that have run over the previous 12 hours. If the Failure Rate of those validations is above 10%, this will go into an “Alert State”. Every 8 hours the system will check the status of the Alert. If the status is in an “Alert State” when this check occurs, an alert will be sent to the email addresses listed within the Alert configuration. In this example, if Google Tag Manager stops firing on the website in question, the operations team will receive an email notifying them of the tagging issue within 8 hours of the failure occurring, allowing them to remediate the issue with only minor data loss.
Stay on top of your tagging and data collection architecture with the Tag Inspector Alert functionality. After the initial set-up of Validations according to the tagging requirements on your website, Alerts will allow for comprehensive automated monitoring of all tag behavior and data collection.
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