Jim Gordon 
We’ve talked about how relying on CSS Selectors is unsustainable. We’ve reviewed the most efficient and sustainable way to implement a data layer. It’s worth taking a step back to review why one would implement a data layer in the first place. So many organizations don’t have one and it’s incredibly difficult to scale this. … Read more
This week I dove into the SDI Toolkit by Search Discovery. If you recall, I already reviewed the lookup table. The extension has since been updated to v1.0.4. We’ll look at the other features included in this utility. While there isn’t configuration necessary in this extension, there is a tutorial baked into the configuration screen. … Read more
Recently, I wrote an appeal to Adobe suggesting they implement first-party support for an event-driven data layer in Adobe Launch. I specifically mentioned an “event-driven, asynchronous data layer”. Let’s just call it the Event-Driven Data Layer (EDDL) to keep it simple. Since the article’s release, I’ve had a number of good conversations on this topic. … Read more
Adobe doesn’t have a recommended way to send/receive a data layer for Adobe Launch and I think they should. I’m not talking about your schema. Send whatever data you want in whatever naming schema makes sense for you or your business. I believe Adobe should take a stance on how the data is sent to Adobe … Read more
I hope to see you all at the Adobe Summit next week in Las Vegas. Here are some sessions I think you should check out: Analytics and Adobe Launch Extension Idol Till’s session about personalization Jim Kultgen’s session on campaign validation Brad’s session on Analytics Workspace tips Anything with Adam Greco Ajay’s session about what’s new … Read more
I hear this question pretty frequently. There’s Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Google Tag Manager – certainly there MUST be an Adobe Tag Manager… right? Well, yes and no. Adobe Tag Manager (version 1) was the original tag management solution for the Adobe Marketing Cloud. This was when tag management … Read more
Hands up! This is the DEA! Evolytics’ Data Element Assistant (DEA) is a collection of Data Element utilities built to keep your hands off of coding JavaScript. This sounds good in my book. Let’s take a look at each element and talk about how they behave! As a note, this is current as of v1.6.1. … Read more
There are thousands of vendors out there. Dozens have already created Adobe Launch extensions to load tracking pixels specific to their product. For everything else, there’s the Pixel Loader by 33Sticks. My first reaction when seeing this was: “Pasting snippets into rules is easy. Why would I need this?” In fact, Adobe DTM was intentionally … Read more
We’re going to do something a little different for this review. There are 2 extensions that are currently on the Adobe Launch marketplace that have the same utility. One is named Lookup Table Utility by Blast Analytics & Marketing v. The other is part of the SDI Toolkit by Search Discovery v1.0.3. Full disclosure: I have no … Read more
So… should you use a data layer? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes. I’ll explain why. This is a simple concept, but I’ve worked with enough experienced analysts who still do not buy into this best practice. I’ve heard every excuse of why someone won’t implement a data layer and as I get older it’s … Read more