Enable, debug, and customize the Adobe Analytics Activity Map

Transcript

In this video, I’d like to walk you through a few ways you can get more value out of Adobe Analytics Activity Map. Activity Map is an application that’s designed to rank link activity using visual overlays, and provides a dashboard of real-time analytics to monitor the audience engagement of your web pages. This essentially means it provides a heatmap of your data on top of your website. This can be quite visually interesting and valuable to you, and it’s quite easy to deploy. If you’re new to Activity Map, head over to the Adobe Analytics Activity Map documentation for detailed steps on how to deploy activity map. If you’re using the Adobe Analytics extension, the nice easy thing is that it already includes Activity Map. So if you head to any web page, you can very easily see that Activity Map is getting called. To check that Activity Map is being called, load the Experience Platform Debugger, which opens a new window showing you all the analytics tags that are being called. If you want to see if Activity Map is being called on a particular link, click that link to fire a new tag. I’ve already clicked a sign in link here, and we can see that we have a few specific data elements that are reserved and used by the Activity Map plugin, and the Activity Map feature within Adobe Analytics. You can see listed here we have “Activity Map Link”, “Page”, and “Region”. So to break these down, Link is telling you what text the user clicked.

Page is telling you the page that the user is coming from, and Region is the region of the page that was being clicked using CSS. And so that’s how you can use the debugger to easily tell if Activity Map is firing, and if it’s collecting data for a given link. Now let’s say, for example, that you have a website that has a profile or account page where you click on an email address in order to edit a user’s profile. Clicking on the email address link would actually capture the email address as the data value for Activity Map link. This is something we don’t want to have happen as an email address is personally identifiable information or PII, so you need a way to filter out specific links like this on your website, so that Activity Map doesn’t automatically capture that information and send it off to analytics with PII in it. There are a couple of options for excluding links using Configuration variables. You can define a link itself using “s.ActivityMap.linkExclusions”, or you can exclude a region on a page using “s.ActivityMap.regionExclusions”. Using the region exclusion is a little bit more straightforward than the link exclusion. To define the link exclusion, you have to add some CSS and then actually inject some code on the page. Whereas with region exclusions, the process is a little bit friendlier, as it can be completely deployed in a rule and doesn’t require any CSS or hidden spans or anything like that. Refer to the Link Tracking Methodology documentation for further details about these configuration variables and to review their associated code. So for our example, we’ll use “s.ActivityMap.regionExclusions” to define a region to exclude from Activity Map. We’ll navigate to Data Collection and then create a new rule. For this particular email link example, I’ve actually already created a rule, but let’s take a look at how this rule is built. We need to define when the rule should be fired. So we’ll call the rule in the page bottom. And then we’ll set the “location.pathname” to our demo web page containing the email link we want to exclude. So this indicates that we only want this rule to be called on this specific page we’ve defined. Then you simply set up an action for Adobe Analytics. So select the Adobe Analytics extension from the drop down and then select Set Variable. Scroll all the way to the bottom and open the editor and simply take that “s.ActivityMap.regionExclusions ” and set it to the div ID that you’re looking to filter out. For our example, that would be the email address. And we already know that it has a div ID of “email”. So we’ve set this equal to “email”. We’ll save this region exclusion. And it’s as easy as that. The next time the email link is clicked it won’t be captured by Activity Map. Now if you want to set a broader exclusion rather than creating a rule, you can define your exclusion criteria using doPlugins in your Adobe Analytics extension. I already have doPlugins in my tracker, but you can refer to the doPlugins documentation for information on how to set it up in your Analytics extension. You can see here that I have already added the ability to exclude the region of “home” within doPlugins, and what this will do is it will make sure that every single page that contains a div ID of “home” will exclude that region from Activity Map. Now, it’s important to be aware that doPlugins will actually override the exclusions we have set in our rules. So what happens is that our rule to exclude the email link is called and then doPlugins fires which overwrites that rule. So if you’re going to use a mix of defining link exclusions through rules and doPlugins, you’ll want to do something like this. So that it takes the region exclusions defined using rules, and then adds on to that whatever exclusions are defined in doPlugins. Now you know how to use the debugger to verify Activity Map tags on a website, and how to define link exclusions. Hopefully this is useful in helping you to debug and customize Activity Map. Thanks for watching.