Validating Hits - Measurement Protocol

This document describes how to validate Google Analytics Measurement Protocol hits.

Overview

The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol does not return HTTP error codes, even if a Measurement Protocol hit is malformed or missing required parameters. To ensure that your hits are correctly formatted and contain all required parameters, you can test them against the validation server before deploying them to production.

This guide describes the process for sending hits to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server and explains how to interpret the response.

The Measurement Protocol Hit Builder, a tool that allows you to interactively construct and validate Measurement Protocol hits, uses this validation server.

Sending hits for validation

Hits can be sent to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server via any method currently supported by the Measurement Protocol. The only difference is the URL. To send hits to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server use the endpoint /debug/collect instead of /collect. The follow example shows an invalid hit sent to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server:

https://www.google-analytics.com/debug/collect?tid=fake&v=1

For more details on how to construct a Measurement Protocol hit, see the protocol reference.

Important: hits sent to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server will not show up in reports. They are for debugging only.

Interpreting the Response

Responses from the Measurement Protocol Validation Server will be in JSON format. The following example shows the response for the hit shown above:

{
  "hitParsingResult": [
    {
      "valid": false,
      "hit": "GET /debug/collect?tid=fake\u0026v=1 HTTP/1.1",
      "parserMessage": [
        {
          "messageType": "ERROR",
          "description": "The value provided for parameter 'tid' is invalid. Please see http://goo.gl/a8d4RP#tid for details.",
          "parameter": "tid"
        },
        {
          "messageType": "ERROR",
          "description": "Tracking Id is a required field for this hit. Please see http://goo.gl/a8d4RP#tid for details.",
          "parameter": "tid"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The response root, hitParsingResult, is an array whose length will correspond to the number of hits sent in the original request. Each object in the array will contain the keys valid, hit, and parserMessage. If a hit is invalid, parserMessage will contain an array of objects describing the validation issues. If a hit is valid, parserMessage will be an empty array.

The following table describes the properties of each item in the hitParsingResult array:

Key	Type	Description
valid	Boolean	true for valid hits, false for invalid hits.
hit	string	A string containing the path of the request as well as its method and protocol.
parserMessage	Array	A list of parser messages. If the hit is valid, this array will be empty.
parserMessage.messageType	string	Possible values are "INFO", "WARN", and "ERROR".
parserMessage.description	string	Additional details or steps to fix the validation issue.
parserMessage.parameter	string|undefined	The parameter (if applicable) causing the validation issue.