Can you test google analytics on a localhost address?

Question

I have to test out my new GA account on my local machine.

Will this work just by copying the standard snippet supplied by Google onto the page ?

I don't want to spend 24 hours waiting to see if it will or won't work.

Answer 1

This question remains valid today, however the technology has changed. The old Urchin tracker is deprecated and obsolete. The new asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code uses slightly different code to achieve the same results.

Google Analytics Classic - Asynchronous Syntax - ga.js

The current syntax for setting the tracking domain to none on google analytics looks like this:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);

Google analytics will then fire off the _utm.gif tracker request on localhost. You can verify this by opening the developer tools in your favorite browser and watching the network requests during page load. If it is working you will see a request for _utm.gif in the network requests list.

Updated 2013 for Universal Analytics - analytics.js

Google released a new version of analytics called "Universal Analytics" (late 2012 or early 2013). As I write, this the program is still in BETA so the above code is still recommended for most users with existing installations of Google Analytics.

However, for new developments using the new analytics.js code, the Google Analytics, Advanced Configuration - Web Tracking Documentation shows that we can test Universal Analytics on localhost with this new code:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', {
  'cookieDomain': 'none'
});

Check out the linked documentation for more details on advanced configuration of Universal Analytics.

Update 2019

Both Global Site Tag - gtag.js and Universal Analytics - analytics.js will detect localhost automatically. You do not need to make any change to the configuration.

If gtag.js detects that you're running a server locally (e.g. localhost), it automatically sets the cookie_domain to 'none'.

- developers.google.com