Prepare Experience Platform tags for your Analytics implementation

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video I want to give you a list of things to think about and to prepare as you’re getting ready to implement for Adobe Analytics. And most especially if you’re going to use the tag management platform, which is Adobe Experience Platform Tags. Now, quick informational disclaimer, I guess, and that is this video is to help you understand what to do as you prepare for a, what we call an app measurement implementation, as opposed to Web SDK. So if you’re going to use the experience platform and Experience Platform applications like Customer Journey Analytics, Real-Time CDP or Journey Optimizer, then you’re going to want the Web SDK implementation. But if you’re just using analytics or especially if you’ve already used app measurement implementations on some of your sites, then this is a good choice for you as well until the time that you want to actually move over to Web SDK. So the first thing to know is, do you have access to data collection? So I’m here on the experience cloud homepage and you can see down here I have data collection in this quick access. Well, if you don’t have it there, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have access to it. You can actually go up to the application switcher, these nine dots up here, and you can click on that and go down and see if you have data collection available to you. If you don’t, then you’ll need to talk to somebody at your organization who has access and have them grant you access to that. If you do, you can click on it there. You can click on it down here. It doesn’t matter which one, and it will bring you to the homepage of data collection. Great. Now what we’re going to use and talk about today is tags. Again, tag management, formerly known as launch. So if you know it as launch, just think of that. And now it’s called tags. So the next thing on your list is to get to know data collection tags really well. So there are other videos on experience league. If you go to experience league and you go under learn to tutorials and look for data collection under the experience platform, then you can watch the videos there to get to know all the different features in data collection and in tags. So that’s very important to do. Now let me jump over to Excel for a minute. And here we have our solution design or our blueprint for our site and for the implementation on our site. So hopefully you have something like this. It doesn’t have to look just like this. However you have documented, you know, how you want to implement Adobe Analytics on your site. So you can see here we’ve got the EVARS here and you’ve got props and custom events and different tabs here for these things, at least on mine I do. So you can see here that in the all pages rule, okay, there’s my rule, in tags, I’m going to get this data from the data layer. That’s my data sources, the data layer. I’m going to grab those and put it into EVAR three and four, et cetera. So now this gives you kind of a checklist to say, here’s what I need to do on the, you know, I need to create an all pages rule, something that fires on every page. And I need to make sure that I set EVAR three and four to these values on that rule. So those kinds of things. So I’ll be filled out, I assume for you, and you’ll know, oh, if I’m going to get this kind of data, where am I going to get it from? You know, and where am I going to set it into these are EVARS, you know, and what rules and, you know, do this planning ahead of time. Now let’s go back to analytics and I’m going to go to the admin console. I’m in Adobe Analytics, admin under report suites, and you’re going to want to make sure that you have a report suite created for this. My recommendation is you first just create a development report suite and that as you’re developing your site and implementing that you just use that one because you’re going to be configuring things for that report suite. And if you create a staging and production reports, we right now you’re going to have to, you know, you’re going to have to do it three times. Whereas if you just do a development report suite now, then when you come in, you know, you’re done with that. You’re happy with the implementation. You can come in, you can add a report suite, and then you can select duplicate an existing report suite and basically make a copy of your development report suite two more times for staging and production. And that way you don’t have to do the configuration all over again. Okay, next let’s go back to tags and we need to create a new property. So we’ll create new property over there. I’ve already done that and I called it tags test. And so once you create that and you’ll want to put it, it’ll ask you for here, let me click over here. It’ll ask you for your domain. So mine is enablementadobe.com. And as you create that property, you’ll need to put in your domain and then you’ll get here and you can start creating your rules and setting your data elements and all the things you learned about as you learned about how to use tags. And I’ll just show you a couple more things. As you do this, as you go into extensions, you’re going to want to include a couple of extensions. So I go to my catalog and I’m just going to type ID in here, whoops, ID. And this will bring up my Experience Cloud ID service and I want to include that. So go ahead and install that. And that should already have your marketing cloud organizational ID on there. And you really shouldn’t have to do anything in here at this moment, but you can see you have other kinds of things that you can set in there, your opt-ins and those kinds of things like that. I’m not going to worry about those right now. I’m just going to save that. And then you’re going to go back to the catalog, include analytics, there’s Adobe analytics, and then you’ll install that. And then, you know, you’ll go through and do all the stuff that you need to do there. So I’m not going to get any further on that one. I’ll leave that for other videos, but I will hit save right now. Oh, it needs other stuff. So I’m going to cancel that one for a minute. I should have known that, but we did install anyway, the ID service. Yeah. Once you add the analytics extension, you’re going to have to add some stuff before it lets you save. So you’ll need to do that. But in the meantime, the last thing I wanted to show you is that you’ll want to set a working library. So this will help you so you don’t have to always go back into the publishing flow. You can go in once here, I’ll do it right now. And you can add a library. And I’m just going to call it, you know, dev. And I’m going to link it up to development. And I’m going to hit save and build to development. But before I do that, boy, I need to add all my change resources. I’m going to click on that. This has a couple of things that I’ve added so far, and save and build that. And once that builds, you can see this green dot over here, it’s successful. Now I can select that as my working library. So I don’t have to come back in here every time I change something. When I change something, I can go ahead and just, you know, build it to my working library. Okay, I lied. One more thing to show you. And that is the environments. It’s fine to do all this stuff in here, but how is it hooking to your website? Well, you need to go in here and you go to the icon over here, click on that, and you will get your script, your embed code right here. You can actually, you don’t have to highlight it, you can actually just click on that. It’ll copy it to the clipboard. And then you paste this code inside the head tag of all of the documents on your site, right? All of your pages. So however you include your head section on your site, you’re going to want to put this in there, maybe towards the bottom of the head section so it’s below the data layer and those kinds of things, and below any code, you know, that is setting things into the data layer, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, put that in the head of all the pages of your site, and that will hook it together to this development environment. And so let me close that. And then you’ll want to do the same thing for your staging environment and production environment so you’ll have those two other code snippets to copy and paste into your staging pages and production pages of your site. Anyway, those are some things you can do to get ready for your implementation of Adobe Analytics. I hope this was helpful and good luck.