Adobe Launch provides a lot of comfort and clever features to make tag management super easy. Quite a few of those features, like the amazing Constant Data Element, are provided directly in the Launch UI. However, there are a bunch of nice surprises waiting for us once we start exploring the more backend-y technical capabilities. One place where we can catch a glimpse of what Launch has in store for us is in the configuration of Custom Code Actions from the Core Extension. All we have to do is hover our mouse over the Execute globally tool tip: Adobe points us towards three technical variables which we can use in our implementations. One of them is, in my experience, especially useful: The event object. But what is it and why should you use it? Let’s start exploring! What is the Event Object in Adobe Launch? As you are probably aware, […]
Tag: Tag Management
Why you should use the Constant Data Element more often in Adobe Launch
Adobe Experience Platform Dynamic Data Collection Tags, by Adobe Launch is the most prevalent Tag Management System for Adobe Experience Cloud customers. It is nicely integrated with the available Adobe Solutions and is offered completely for free to those customers. But while it is best enjoyed to fuel other solutions, it is a beast of its own with some unique features and mechanics. I’ve already written a few posts about Adobe Launch’s particular features, like the ability to use call traces between rules or how rules can be executed exactly once. Today I want to focus on a specific Data Element, called the Constant Data Element Type. It has first been created by Jan Exner as a dedicated Launch Extension but has (thankfully!) later been built into the Core Extension. I’m going to show you three of my favorite use cases for this, in my opinion, shamefully overlooked gem. You […]
Exploring Adobe Launch Server Side (aka Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection Event Forwarding)
In digital analytics, there has been a trend lately to move data collection away from the client towards a server side implementation. In most cases, companies try to circumvent technical restrictions like Apple’s “Intelligent” Tracking Protection, make collected data more consistent across analytics tools and marketing platforms, or hide their non-GDPR-compliant setups from their users. This trend also brings some (but not all) elements of tag management to the server side, as Jim Gordon described well. In most scenarios, data and events are collected from the client (like a website or app) using a tag manager. Instead of sending events directly to, for example, Adobe Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, etc., from the browser, they are first sent to a common endpoint that collects, enriches, and forwards data to the desired tools. This common endpoint is usually referred to as a server side tag manager and is implemented in a first-party […]
Should you really build an Adobe Launch Extension?
If you are using any solutions from the Adobe Experience Cloud family of tools, chances are you are also using Adobe’s Tag Management System, Adobe Launch. Launch works like many other Tag Management Systems (TMS), in that it can bring tools and code to a website without the need to change the source code of the website it is running on. This allows the users of the TMS, typically digital analytics or digital marketing teams, to be somewhat independent from IT and development teams when they want to bring technology, like onsite analytics or marketing pixels, to a page. In Adobe Launch, Extensions are used to bring the actual functionality to the websites that it is running on. A good example for this is the Core Extension: This Extension allows us to run JavaScript code on the website (using the Custom Code Data Element or Action), listen for events like […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tracking Apps with Adobe’s new Experience Platform SDKs and the Edge Network
Tracking mobile apps has always been fun for me. Compared to measuring websites, apps are a more controlled environment, which is great for data consistency. Sure, there are some less-fun cases (like those pesky hybrid apps) but the general experience on major platforms like Android and iOS has been quite great! Changes even happen a bit slower compared to browsers and there are way less moving parts to keep track of. Just like when tracking websites, Adobe has been most helpful in providing us the tools we need to collect data in the most effective and consistent way. If you have been tracking mobile apps with Adobe for a while, you will know about the similarities between websites and apps (like having a trackState function that increments Page Views and trackAction for Custom Links) and nice comfort features (like automatically tracking App ID, Launches, Upgrades, etc.) that make it so […]
A basic AEP Web SDK (Codename Alloy) implementation for Adobe Analytics
If you are taking care of an Adobe Experience Cloud implementation, there is practically no way for you to not hear about the new kid on the block: The Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK (also know as Alloy). It is the next big thing for how to implement solutions like Adobe Analytics, Target, Audience Manager, or the Experience Cloud ID Service. Instead of calling a plethora of different libraries and scripts, Web SDK is a single script that handles all functionality and calls trough a shared endpoint. On the other hand, it’s not available to the public yet. If you want to try it out, you need to contact your Adobe Customer Success Manager and request to be included in the beta. That will give you access to the Edge Configuration in Launch and a stripped-down version of Adobe’s Experience Platform to manage the XDM. This already hints that there […]
Bringing clarity to Adobe Launch using Call Traces
The Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) comes with its very own Tag Management System (TMS). With Adobe Launch, by Adobe, implementing a basic set of AEC tools like Analytics or Target is quick and easy. That ease of implementation regarding Adobe’s own tools comes with the possible downside of having to put in more work for non-Adobe tools. Depending on how important those Adobe tools are to you, Launch might be your first choice as TMS regardless. Unfortunately, Launch is not ideal when it comes to more complex setups. For example, having a chain of actions that needs to be executed in a specific order can require some manual workarounds, like putting steps into separate rules. The same is true for guaranteed conditional execution within rules, which requires either custom code actions or branching rules into multiple others. I have seen setups with literally hundreds of rules because of those restrictions. […]
Using Adobe Launch ? for configuration management
Adobe Launch (, by Adobe) ist the tag manager that comes for free with the Adobe Experience Cloud. You can use it to manage and orchestrate all the marketing tags on your websites (not only from Adobe) and reduce integration efforts for the mobile Adobe SDKs to just copy-pasting from the launch interface. For a tutorial, look below on this post. Launch is the successor to the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) which was used in the past, formerly known as Satellite. In 2018 Adobe announced plans to retire DTM fully by 2021 (source: https://medium.com/launch-by-adobe/dtm-plans-for-a-sunset-3c6aab003a6f). So if you are still using DTM, you should start migrating to Launch, which is only a one-click-action under ideal circumstances. Launch can host scripts for pre-tailored use cases (called Extensions) or custom code. With rules, we define when and where things should happen. Last, Data Elements let us define variables that we can use […]