One of the things I love most about Adobe Analytics is how flexible it is. That is not only true for its interface, Analysis Workspace, and the numerous integrations, but also for everything that happens on the actual website where it is implemented. Almost every functional detail can be configured and tweaked, including the destination where the data is actually sent to. For years Adobe has offered Analytics customers the Managed Certificate program, where Adobe would allow us to send data to a server that looks like it belongs to our own company (or, more specifically, our company’s domain). But upon closer inspection, those requests are only disguised as first-party and are actually still sent to Adobe’s servers directly instead of our own. And in addition to that, Adobe Launch and the Experience Cloud ID Service will still load their data from different domains that don’t belong to your company […]
Month: June 2021
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 4: Capturing Data with Web SDK (Alloy)
This post is the fourth post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at our business questions and how we can structure our data most effectively. In this post, we are doing the actual implementation using Adobe Launch, the Adobe Web SDK, and Client Data Layer. On our way to creating a full-scope, front-to-back implementation of Customer Journey Analytics to track a web site, we are now ready to think about our actual implementation. Since we have the data structure in place and already have an awesome Experience Event Schema, we just need some actual data. The logical choice to feed data to the Adobe stack is, of course, by utilizing their client-side tools as well. Specifically, we are going to use Adobe Launch […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 3: Data Structure in Experience Platform
This post is the third post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at the different possible solution architectures we can use to bring data into Customer Journey Analytics and decided on the best one. In this post, we will take a look at our actual business questions and how we can structure our data most effectively. From the last post we already know that we want to track data using only the new Adobe Web SDK going forward. To make that work, we need to create a schema in Experience Platform first, which defines the structure of the data that we want to capture. While some people (sometimes me included) see schema management as one of the more tedious tasks in Platform, I […]
Processing Adobe Analytics Data Feeds with Apache NiFi for Adobe Experience Platform
In the series of posts that is currently being released on this blog I’m showing how companies can move from Adobe Analytics to the brand new Customer Journey Analytics to utilize the many advantages of the new tool. However, I feel like the current Adobe-provided solution for bringing data from that old to the new world lacks some essential information. I did an extensive comparison in the most recent post of the series, but will give some of the reasons here again. When we use the Adobe Analytics Data Connector to bring data from an Adobe Analytics Report Suite into Experience Platform, we are dealing with some limitations: The data is based on what Adobe calls mid-values. Those sit between raw, unprocessed data, and fully processed data in the processing chain. Because of this, we don’t have access to dimensions like persisted Evars, Visit Number, and other data points we […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 2: System Architecture in Experience Platform
This post is the second post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we discussed the motivation and scope of this project and why, eventually, existing Adobe Analytics customers will start moving to Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics. In this post, we will take a look at the different possible solution designs we can use to bring data into Customer Journey Analytics and decide on the best one. Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics is built on Adobe’s brand new Experience Platform. With that, it is very flexible in terms of how data can be brought into the tool. Depending on the setup it may seem very easy to bring data in quickly. However, all that flexibility also means we have many ways to deviate from the ideal path, so we […]
Execute a rule only once in Adobe Launch
When you are managing an implementation of Adobe tools like Analytics, chances are you are using Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection, formerly known as Adobe Launch, Adobe Dynamic Tag Management, or the Adobe Tag Manager (and no, this is not a SEO text, it’s the actual list of names. I will still call it Launch for the near future) to implement other tags as well. While Launch is great for making implementation of Adobe’s own tools very fast and easy, managing other tools is not always so straight forward. A common requirement for those 3rd Party tags is to fire a certain tag or pixel only once. What once really means (once per session, user, day, year?) might differ from tag to tag, so as a result it can be surprisingly difficult to fulfill those requirements reliably and consistently. On top of those varying definitions of once, Adobe Launch has […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 1: Goodbye Adobe Analytics, my Old Friend
This post is the first post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In this part, we discuss the motivation and scope of this project and why, eventually, existing Adobe Analytics and new customers will start moving to Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics. If you found this article, chances are high you work in or adjacent to the field of digital analytics or web analytics. It doesn’t really matter if you are an existing Adobe Analytics user, on the Google stack, or just looking for your very first web analytics tool. If you have been following the trends and discussions in our industry in the recent time, you will likely already have caught on the massive changes that both our industry and Adobe’s products go through. With changes to privacy requirements and cookie […]