How to test a campaign in universal analytics?

Question

How does one test a campaign (rather than release it to production) in Google Universal Analytics?

What kind of a campaign are you talking about? Is it manually tagged? — nyuen, Mar 12 '15 at 15:40
Do you have a development environment with a separate Analytics profile? — Stephen Ostermiller♦, Mar 12 '15 at 17:40
I have a dev environment, but not a seperate Analytics profile. — leeand00, Mar 12 '15 at 17:46
Are you able to create a test property for testing purposes only so as to not pollute the prod data? — nyuen, Mar 12 '15 at 17:55

Stephen Ostermiller · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-21 10:03:17Z

Create a separate Google Analytics profile for your dev environment.
Configure your dev server to use a different Google Analytics snippet
Test your campaign URLs against your dev server
View realtime analytics to verify that the the campaign parameters do what you want as they come in
Test the functionality
The next day view the dev analytics reports and make sure everything was tracked properly

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