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, […]
Category: Adobe Launch
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 […]
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 […]