Adobe Launch – 101 | Blog

Today in this fast-growing world where most of the firms are switching to digitalization and making their presence globally. It brings into consideration the most prior thing the firms need to acknowledge i.e how well their websites are performing and how can they maximize the traffic on their websites. When today you can use an efficient Tag Manager and have an ability to add and update your own tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. With this you can explore new insights, boost the speed of running marketing campaigns along with optimizing and enhancing the user experience. This changes the game entirely!

To all this business problems and support you, there is one tool which act as a solution and that is Adobe Launch.

So, the question arises what is Adobe Launch and how it can help us?

Adobe Launch is a next generation tag management system that unifies the client- side marketing ecosystem by empowering development to build integration on a robust extensible platform that partner, client and the broader industry can build on and contribute to.

Now, the next question arises that what makes Adobe Launch so useful?

There are various benefits of using Adobe Launch as a tool let’s talk about some of them.

Launch Tag Placement: To implement Adobe Launch Tag on your website you do not need any coding expertise, it's easy to use. You just need to place the Launch tag in the head section of your website, and this will do the part.
Sharing data to various Tools: By using Adobe Launch you can configure various extensions where you need to send the data accordingly. So, it simplifies the process of sharing data to multiple tools/extensions.
Managing various domains in one account: It gives you the feasibility to manage various domains by creating separate property for each one.
Placing pixels through Adobe Launch: You can place various tags or pixels using Adobe Launch on your site which reduces the page load time which occurs when the tags are directly placed on the site.

Purpose of Adobe Analytics: -

Adobe Analytics is the industry-leading solution for applying real-time analytics and customizable visualizations that drive better marketing. You can use it to discover high-value audiences and power customer intelligence for your business. Adobe Analytics APIs offer limitless ways to integrate your most important customer data into key business processes.

Implementation of Adobe Analytics through Adobe launch: -

For any implementation of Adobe Analytics on the website, firstly we must add the extension of adobe analytics in the launch and the configuration is to be done.

Extensions

An extension is an integration that adds new option for tags.
Extensions can be built by any developer (Adobe, Partner, Customer).
Extensions reduces reliance on custom code.

Configuration: -

Provide the Report suite Ids: -

There will be three options or three places where you need to provide the report suite Ids. The first one is a development report Suite ID. If you have a Dev environment, which is a standard best practice that needs to be there so that your production data is different from the test data that you would do, and then there is staging to Prod suite. Now, the difference between staging and development is that staging is supposedly as close as possible to production, but it's still not live for the general audience. And production is finally the live report suite that is for the live audience, a live website. The data would be passed into the production report suite. You can select the Report Suite ID, which is relevant for the development, staging, and production. In case you do not know the Report suite IDs, then you must get in touch with your Adobe Analytics Account Manager. Or you can approach the client care if you have the relevant accesses and just confirm with them, what is the Report suite ID and put them over here.

Now we are going to see how we can manage the analytics library through Adobe Launch. By default, the first one is Manage the library for me right now. If you are not aware, then whatever we are doing over here by the various forms in the drop boxes and all these radio buttons in all ultimately gets translated into a big chunk of code. And that code takes care of all the functions and all the configurations that we are doing over here. So, the kind of tracking and everything the Adobe Analytics functions are all going to be handled by that big block of code. And that block of code is called the library. When you say to manage a library for me, then you let Adobe manage that big block of code for you. And Adobe would take its prerogative to manage the most optimized version of the library for you right now, this is a common option, and this is the default option.

Now, moving to set the global variables. 

So global variables are where you can set the variables that would fire on all the stable hits, fire on page loads, as well as even calls. And when we set the values in global variables, then sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not work. Okay, so a better option is that once you have created this extension and configured it. By creating a rule, you can set the values as per your requirements.

Now, moving to the link tracking setting. The first option that we have is ‘Enable click map’. It shows the area where users are clicking more or not clicking. The second option that we have is ‘Track Download links’. So, here is a list of the links which users click upon there would be considered as downloads. You can also add new extension links that are unique to your websites. Next is ‘Track outbound links’ so any of the links which are having a URL that does not belong to the domain of the website which you already defined. So, they would be considered as Outbound links.

Now Visitor Id. You might be aware that by default Analytics tracks the visitors by the cookie id specifically on the websites and the mobile sites. Now what visitor id does is overrides the default value and gives a new value to the cookie. By default, you can leave it as it is not mandatory to set also be very careful with this one you have to make sure it does not pass the wrong values or static values otherwise all the visitors would be considered as the same user.

Firing the page load call: -

We have to create a Page load rule for the extension that we have created for Adobe Analytics. First, we have to go to Rules, if we are creating a new rule then Add Rule. Name the rule then in the Event section, most of the time's page load happen at like DOM Ready, Page Top, Page Bottom or we can also put Custom codes. There are Pros and Cons for every approach, so we choose as per our requirement. In this, we don’t need to put any Condition as we want it to fire on every page, so we leave it blank. Now in Action, as soon as you install an extension, so all those extensions start coming up. So, we will use our Adobe analytics extension, now the first one we are going to take is set variables, here we can add the variables for the page load rule something like we want to fire on all page loads so that we can be configured by drop-down option or by writing some custom codes and save the changes. Once we set the variables, we another action we have to create by using plus sign and these time actions will be a beacon on that we will get two options s.t() and s.tl(). ‘tl’ is for track links these are for event calls and ‘t’ is for page load calls. So, we have to select s.t() and keep the changes and in case of link calls, we have to add another action which is a Clear variable in case some variables are persisting which we do not want them to persist it is for the betterment. Save it then go to your publishing flow add a new library then select the environment, click on add all changed resources then Save & Build to development. Now the rule is created for the Dev environment and check for the same on the website if everything seems okay push the library step by step to the Production. 