If you use Google Analytics to measure traffic and activity on your website, once you start customizing the tracker code, use the asynchronous tracker, or do more complicated tracking it can be hard to verify that your changes have worked. The asynchronous tracker won’t necessarily emit any js errors and you can’t always waitio see any effect in the analytics dashboard.
Anyway, wouldn’t you like to see exactly what data the beacon is sending to the mothership? If you use Chrome, you’re in luck as Google has released an extension to do just that. Grab the Google Analytics Tracking Code Debugger – Chrome Web Store, then enable the button it places to the right of the location bar. Open up the javascript console and you should see a stream of the data the tracker sends.