You know that feeling when your dbt model runs but the numbers look... off? Not broken, just weird enough to make you question your SQL. Most data quality surprises start with 'let me just quickly fix this.' What if you wrote the tests before the model instead? This guide applies Test-Driven Development to analytics engineering: unit tests, model contracts, and defining what 'good' looks like before you write a single SELECT.
Remember when dbt projects meant folders full of SQL files and crossing your fingers that your transformations were correct? dbt 1.8 finally brought unit testing, but macro testing is still limited. This post walks through unit testing your business logic—like standardizing campaign sources—and a workaround for testing macros so you can catch broken SQL before it wrecks your dashboards.
There's nothing like watching 20 browser windows pop-up on your screen to make you feel like a proper hacker. Let's write a Python script to do GDPR consent checks with Playwright and detect the consent manager, cookies set, and marketing and analytics trackers on a site.
Whether it's because you don't want your business to lose money or because you just like to watch videos on YouTube, automating your analytics monitoring can help you sit back and relax knowing that everything's under control. This time we'll look at how a simple Google Sheet can help you check your analytics on the fly with the Google Analytics Real Time Reporting API.
Testing your analytics setup regularly can help you prevent uncomfortable situations with your boss or client when there's been another change on the site and suddenly all your campaigns and goals have zero conversions. We will look at how to test the actual requests that are being sent to Google Analytics, Facebook, or any other place you have your tags pointed at.
One thing that's often overlooked in setting up your analytics is making sure it keeps working. When you add new tags or your developers deploy new versions it's easy to forget about your site tracking until the revenue in your ecommerce reports drops to zero. That's usually the point where accusations fly back and forth past the office chairs and the boardroom starts asking uncomfortable questions. So let's set up some tests for your analytics and tag management.