Sandbox Overview

It’s common for websites to have pre-production environments to test code before public release. These include local, development, staging, and many similar types of environments. To help you test, we will provide you a sandbox dashboard.

We recommend testing the Parse.ly tracking script in such an environment to avoid conflating testing efforts with production data that your team will make decisions with.

How to start

After purchasing Parse.ly, our Support team will create your Parse.ly Site IDs. You’ll have a Site ID for each of your monitored domains and one more Site ID for your sandbox. We will provide a list of these Site IDs via email. From there, you may proceed as follows:

1. Respond to our email with the location(s) you will test from
   • If testing locally, we’ll need the IP address(es).
   • Otherwise, provide a list of testing domains.
   • We will allowlist the domains for the provided sandbox Site ID. This is because Parse.ly doesn’t track cross-domain by default. The sandbox Site ID won’t match your testing location. It will usually appear in one of the following formats:
     • sandbox.example.com if you only have a single production dashboard
     • sandbox.publisher-name if you have multiple production dashboards
2. Add the tracking code to your site with any of our supported methods
3. Note that sandbox metadata collection differs from production methods
   • Production metadata collection occurs via Crawl
   • We presume that preproduction environments are not publicly accessible, i.e., not available to our crawler. So, we collect sandbox metadata in-pixel.
   • To request an exception to our default settings, notify us in Asana or via email
4. Monitor your sandbox dashboard and test your implementation
5. Make any necessary adjustments
6. Do you need help? Let us know in your Asana project or send us an email
7. When you’re ready, proceed to production work

Alternatives

Pre-purchase testing

If you want Parse.ly but you first want tangible performance details of our tracking code on your site, then you may add our tracking code today. In this case, you won’t have a Parse.ly Site ID nor the Dashboard to see everything in action. In lieu of a valid Site ID, enter your site domain in the format example.com like this:

<script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/example.com/p.js" async="" defer=""></script>

With the script in place, test your implementation to ensure you’re generating pageviews. In this case, we expect to see a network response containing idsite: genericconfigfree. This indicates that you’ve successfully installed the tracking code but that it doesn’t match an unlocked Site ID.

Again those steps are:

1. Add the tracking code to your site
2. Replace example.com with your domain
3. Test your implementation

If everything worked out, contact us to schedule a demo and learn more.

Go straight to production work

We do not enforce any requirements to test our tracking code first. You may proceed with integration at your own pace.

We’re done with the sandbox, now what?

You may proceed by:

1. Add the tracking code to your production environment(s)
2. Use your production Parse.ly Site IDs on your production sites
3. Ensure that your:
   • sandbox doesn’t have your production Site ID
   • production environments don’t have your sandbox Site ID
4. Test your implementation
5. Make any necessary adjustments
6. Need help? Let us know via email
7. When you’re ready, proceed to the next step of integration: send us your metadata