How can I confirm that my site is sending pageviews or videostarts to Parse.ly?

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Google Chrome’s developer tools are your friend in this endeavor. To check whether or not Parse.ly pageviews or videostarts are firing, navigate to one of your pages in Chrome and open your developer tools by hitting Command + Shift + C on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + C in Windows/Linux. If you have an ad-blocker installed, make sure to disable it.

Checking for pageviews

Click into the “Network” tab in Developer tools and filter for “action=pageview”. Then, refresh the page and see whether a pageview is being sent (the request would begin “?rand=”). Click on the request, and switch over to the “Payload” tab to view the “Query String Parameters” section. You should see something like this:

1. “action=pageview” filter
2. pageview
3. Parse.ly Site ID
4. URL of the current page
5. Referral URL

Note that url and urlref values can’t be relative paths (e.g. “/article” as opposed to “https://www.example.com/article”)—they have to be full URLs.

If you are sending extra data for audience segments based on custom data, you can see the key/value pair in the “data” parameter.

Checking for videostarts

To confirm that you’re tracking videos correctly, follow a similar workflow. Click into the “Network” tab in Developer tools and filter for “action=videostart” in your developer tools. Press play on a video in your browser, and see if a “?rand” request appears below. Click on that request and switch to the “Payload” tab and look in the “Query String Parameters” section. Check to see whether the “url” field matches the page on which the video is played, and confirm that the “metadata” field includes the attributes listed here.

1. “action=videostart” filter
2. videostart
3. Parse.ly Site ID
4. URL for the page on which the video is being played
5. video metadata