There are several methods to validate and debug analytic implementations using Adobe App Measurement Libraries. Over-the-Top (OTT) Providers can use the following method to validate their analytics implementation for iPhone, android, Xbox 360,  Roku and connected TVs of all kinds, and more.
The web proxy is the most common method for capturing analytics requests. Using a web proxy, it’s possible to log all requests, making it quick to set up, exposes measurement behavior on actual device. Additionally, since some web proxies allow you to modify requests, developers can test out new configurations without modifying any code on their live site. The details in this post are intended to help those responsible for validating app analytics by showing how to use a web proxy like Charles (http://www.charlesproxy.com), Bloodhound (https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/mobile/bloodhound_win_2x/), or Adobe App Measurement QA Tool.
Charles is a full TCP proxy that allows rewriting requests. It works with Android because everything can run through it–not just Omniture data. I use its rewrite rules to split off any Omniture traffic and direct it to Bloodhound’s port on my laptop; everything else passes through.
By configuring WiFi proxy settings on your device and using a packet sniffer on another computer attached to the same network, you can watch http/https requests made by the application, including requests sent by the App Measurement libraries.
You can set up your device to use Bloodhound as its proxy by modifying your device’s wifi connection. The following instructions may be different depending on your flavor of Android, but it should give you an idea of how to make it work.
Steps for Getting Up and Running with Bloodhound

Open the “Settings” app
Click on “Wi-Fi”
Tap and hold your currently connected Wi-Fi network and select “Modify network”
Check the box “Show advanced options”
In the “Proxy” field, select “Manual”
In the “Proxy hostname” field, enter the IP address Bloodhound has been assigned
In the “Proxy port” field, enter the port number Bloodhound has been assigned
Hit “Save”
Assuming your device and Bloodhound instance are on the same network, your data should be filtering through Bloodhound now.

 
 

So you have management buy-in to implementing Adobe Analytics, now what? It’s time to start to ensure digital governance is in place before you implement your Adobe Analytics solution.
In the words of the great fictional Peter Parker, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. Building a safe digital governance program can provide a collaborative ecosystem that will both safeguard and streamline your digital initiatives across the enterprise. Ensuring a thought out process flow could save time, money and resources, let alone much unneeded stress. Taking the time to create a end-to-end engagement model can help govern your analytics for implementation including your ongoing digital marketing efforts.
Most large and small enterprises who are using Adobe Dynamic Tag Management System to manage their implementation of digital marketing technology solutions such as Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager find it difficult to govern their digital efforts as their adoption rate increases among users (common for both internal and external associates when dealer with multiple Business Units, Lines of Business and vendors), new features/version updates, IT releases or a change in tag/tool selection. The list can go on.
Thus, standardizing a process for when building your team ahead of time has long become best practice for implementing your analytics solution among other digital initiatives. Having a strong understanding of your digital enterprise can help you build a solid governing framework that can be the baseline for your Digital Center of Excellence (Digital CoE), a digital transformation movement/approach that many of Perficient’s clients have adopted and strived in.

Exhibit 1: An example of Digital Center of Excellence (Digital CoE)

Instilling a digital governance program in your Digital CoE can help organize your team and position yourself for success when it comes to delivering a set of business enabling services around a common digital platform such Adobe Dynamic Tag Management and Adobe Analytics.
Luckily for Adobe Marketing Cloud users, Adobe’s free enterprise level tag management system makes it easy to control user access, environment, code changes and load order to name a few. Below is an example of how a team can engage from all levels in the Digital CoE when implementing Adobe Analytics using DTM.

Adobe Analytics Digital Governance Framework: A Proposed Engagement Model

Exhibit 2: An Engagement Model example

The proposed engagement model is assuming you are using both Adobe Dynamic Tag Management and Adobe Analytics. The model is based on an Agile Methodology and is designed for rapid implementation while also leveraging existing capabilities where needed without putting your digital initiatives at risk.
The framework can be customized to fit other enterprise level tag management systems and analytics solutions outside of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Learn more about how Adobe Analytics and Dynamic Tag Manager are among the tools successful organizations are using to make data-driven marketing decisions.

Using Visitor ID to connect visitor profiles across Adobe Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager has been on Adobe’s to do list for a long time and many marketers as well. Far too long, integration between the Adobe products included many gaps and data integration issues such cookie deletion and dependency on data collection servers to setting their version of a third party cookie, called “s_vi”. As a temporarily solution, Adobe set a default backup cookie, “s_fid”, in case the cookie was deleted since these cookies were being set by servers outside the parent domain on a browser. The other option and more cumbersome solution for implementing the first party visitor ID cookie was to use a CNAME record on our client’s DNS in order to avoid setting a 3rd party cookie altogether. Obviously, there was a need and room to grow from Adobe’s side.
The Marketing Cloud Visitor ID service, AMCV ID, is supported by the following libraries and SDKs: Adobe Dynamic Tag Mnagement, Adobe Analytyics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Target and Adobe Mobile Services.

Source: https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/why-new-adobe-marketing-cloud-id-service-should-be-on-your-radar/

Migrating from Adobe Analytics Legacy Visitor ID
This migration will either store the legacy cookie (s_vi) to the AMCV cookie or create a new AMCV cookie, which will be used as its replacement all together.
Implementing AMCV in Adobe Dynamic Tag Mangement

Prerequisites – Adobe Requirements

1. Contact Client Care to obtain the Marketing Cloud Organization ID ie. (MCOrg ID)
2. Ensure your scode is on AppMeasurement version 1.3 or later, scode H.27 or later.
3. Make sure your Adobe Adobe server calls are going to Regional Data Collection, meaning your image requests are being sent to RDC tracking server ( ie. .sc.omtrdc.net) instead of a Non-RDC tracking server, (ie. .2o7.net).
4. Next, deploy your new VisitorAPI Javascript library. Log into your Admin Console and get the VisitorAPI.js file from the Code Manager. This can be in your scode file or in DTM in the tool’s setting, but it must be placed at the beginning of the file. Important Note: The placement of this code needs to fire first in the order sequence in order to be leveraged by the other Adobe JS libraries.
5. Configure your Visitor ID service.
6. Set Visitor ID in a Custom Variable (sprop or eVar) to test quality assurance. (Below is the Custom JS to capture the AMCV in a DTM Data Element that is ready to be mapped to a custom variable.) You can also set the AMCV in a cookie using a native DTM function to either map or verify in the Developers Console. (_satellite.setCookie(‘cookie name’,’cookie value’,days to expire)
7. As precaution, please be sure to check Adobe Analytics server call as there should be an additional parameter called “mid”, the Marketing Cloud Visitor ID.

Now that you have the foundation for your Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Audience Manager tools, you can feel confident about your data being unified and now you are finally ready to start building your campaigns, profiles, activities, and reports.

At this year’s summit Adobe Summit, we had the exciting opportunity to showcase Perficient as a leading Adobe partner. As a Silver Sponsor, we felt it was our duty to demo Adobe powerful products from the Marketing Cloud by integrating Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM – formally known as Satellite), Adobe Experience Manager (AEM – formally known as CQ5), Adobe Target (formally known as Test&Target) and Adobe Analytics (formally known as SiteCatalyst) seamlessly into a hybrid mobile application.
Overview
Perficient was self tasked to feature a highly interactive, visually compelling Adobe Summit App built in AEM Mobile that allows users to see real-time analytics from Adobe Workbench, an interactive analytics application part of Adobe Analytics that allows you to build visualization dashboards, as well as experience personalized content based off their responses on the survey taken from their mobile device.
Challenge
Integrating DTM and Target on a single page application in AngularJs, a JavaScript front-end framework.
The application was built with Cordova (formally known as Adobe PhoneGap), a hybrid app development framework which consist of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, we were able to leverage the mobile platform’s Web view to render content. Since DTM is a JavaScript based container, we were able to integrate many of the other Adobe Marketing Cloud products that we come so accustom to.
Using DTM as a host for Adobe Tools such as Adobe Analytics and Target, you are able to push, configure, track, integrate and perform marketing initiatives such as performing A/B tests with different components on the page and tracking user activities on your app.
STEP 1
We built a base template for each page (“mobileapps/components/angular/ng-page”) and we extended our pages from that template by creating an AEM (CQ) project using Apache Maven, a building management tool.
STEP 2
After configuring our property in Adobe Dynamic Tag Management, we went to our first page in the app, in this case the login page, and inserted the DTM bootleg snippet.
“<script src=”https://assets.adobedtm.com/3215e845c9690cbe968752c99b825440070e111f/satelliteLib-21077d4adfcbef88029b6d7609a4be07d51b0616-staging.js”></script>”

Notes: Place snippet before the end of <head> section in the head.jsp;

Screenshots from CRXDE Lite (Adobe AEM) and Maven Project

 
 
 
STEP 3
In the login page component, go to body.jsp, and insert the DTM snippet in the body of the page.
“<script type=”text/javascript”>_satellite.pageBottom();</script>”
Notes: Place snippet before the end of <body>;
Screenshots from CRXDE Lite (Adobe AEM) and Maven Project

STEP 4

Since the summit app is an Angular SPA, we just needed to put the snippets in the first page, and the JS will be loaded/available for all other pages.

Therefore the next step was to UAT/QA and verify the JS was getting downloaded correctly.
STEP 5
Now we are ready to add our Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target tools in DTM, where we were able to implement our analytics solution design and run different personalize tests based data being collected from Adobe Analytics including custom variables and success events.

Part of every implementation requires multiple environments, load order rules, data collection processing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Unfortunately, there currently isn’t a solution in the market that can unify all these moving pieces due to the complex nature of data collection but I have a list of tools that can make your life easier and concise free when it comes to auditing your Adobe Analytics, formally known as SiteCatalyst or Omniture, and Adobe Dynamical Tag Management (DTM) implementations and future releases.
Most of today’s savvy digital analytics marketers are already either using a tag management system or started migrating their legacy clickstream hard code implementation to a TMS approach. To successfully audit your Adobe Analytics implementation, you must first understand the full process of data collection for your specific implementation. For the purpose of this post, our use case will be focus on auditing our Adobe Analytics and DTM implementation.
DTM Process
Potential Issues:
A data element (Cookie, URL Parameter, Custom Script, CSS Selector, or JS Object) that is mapped to a tool such as Adobe Analytics can return empty if the wrong load rule was selected.

Source: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/processing_rule_order.html
Solution: Disruptive Advertising’s Adobe DTM Debugger
Description: Easily view your Processing Rule Sets and Processing Order.
Pricing: Free
Link: http://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/analytics/introducing-the-adobe-dtm-debugger/
Adobe Analytics Process
Potential Issues:
If the selected Dimensions (Custom Values, Context Data, Traffic Variables, Hit Attributes, Conversion Variables, Success Events) uses an incorrect conditional logic statement, your data collection could cause major ramifications such as overwriting variables and incorrect mapping.

Source: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/processing_rule_order.html
Solution: Stratigent’s Adobe Analytics SMART Bookmarklet
Description: Easily view your Processing Rule Sets and Processing Order.
Pricing: There are two pricing models for the application:

1. Current version, no updates:  $5,000 for unlimited use, one-time fee
2. Current version, plus any future updates to it:  $10,000 for unlimited use, one-time fee

Link: http://www.stratigent.com/our-solutions/partner-specific-solutions/adobe-analytics-smart-bookmarklet
Other Considerations:
Adobe DTM Switch: Adobe self-owned plugin extension that allows you to toggle the debug mode and staging mode for Adobe Dynamic Tag Management.
Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP): Digital Analytics quality assurance auditing tool created by Cardinal Path that allows you to visualize what and where tags are firing.

ObservePoint Tag Debugger: Creates a new tab in the developer tools to enable quick finding and detailed viewing of analytics tags and other technologies on the current page.

There are a number of digital data collection auditing options available from web packet sniffers, browser plugins, console add-ons and QA tools, but these solutions were selected for 2 reasons, which are 1) Adobe centric and 2) User Friendly. These solutions should help get you started and up and running with safe guarding your Adobe Analytics implementation.