Tracking Actions (AKA Custom Links) in a Mobile App with the Experience Platform SDK

In this video, - I wanna talk about the Adobe Experience - Platform SDK and using the trackAction API - to track mobile app actions. And so actions, as you can see - up here in the documentation, are events that - occur in your app, and we’re gonna - use this API to track and measure - those actions. It could be, as you can see - here, a new subscription or an article is viewed, - or a level is completed, or a click on something, - or whatever really is not a screen view - or a page view, because those are normally - tracked with trackState, but anything else that is - not a screen coming up, like a page coming up, you’re gonna wanna - track with trackAction. And we want - to look at how that will affect - your Adobe Analytics and how that hit that - comes from the app will send stuff into - Adobe Analytics, so that’s what - we’re gonna do. Now, - looking at the examples here, you’ll see that we have - Objective C and Swift examples as well as Android and I - wanna look at the example here and notice that, - when we call this library ACPCore and trackAction, we are then going to - put in an action name. Now, this hit that comes - from using this API is basically the same as - a web property using s.tl or a track link or also - known as a custom link hit. So this action name - will be kind of like that custom link hit and we - will see that in the beacon and we’ll take - a look at that in the debugger in - just a few moments. In addition to - that action name and saying what is - actually happening when this trackAction - is fired, you can also send - additional data points in, so you might wanna send - in one key value pair, like this example shows or you - may not care to send in any or you probably will want - to send in at least one, but you might even want - to send in more than that. So we’ll take a - look here in Xcode to see how you - can do that, so let’s jump - over there now. Okay, so I do need to back - up potentially a little bit, before we really talk about - the trackActions down here and show that we do need to - import the ACPCore library. Now trackAction, - along with trackState as well, you might have thought they - would be in Analytics API or in Analytics - method/function, but it really - belongs to the core and it’s been moved there, - because we might want to inform other solutions that this - trackAction has happened. But in this case, again, we’re gonna talk - about analytics today. So you definitely need that - import ACPCore on the page where we’re gonna have - this trackAction called. Now you’ll see on this - page, on this example page, that I have trackStates - up here as well and I just wanna use - that as the example for additional - data being sent, because I don’t need to - have it in both places. But where you can see - that the data is up here, you can send data: nil, - if you don’t wanna send any data, you could send one - key value pair, you could send multiple - key value pairs by sending a comma - separated list or you can send in a data - dictionary object here and that would - be fine too. So you can do all these same - things with trackAction as well since you also have this - data parameter here. So in our example here of - how we are using trackAction in this example, - in this video, we are just going to send - in one key value pair. We’re gonna send in… After data, - we’re gonna send in NonStop equals off - or NonStop equals on. So what we’re really - doing here in this example is we are just tracking - the interaction with this checkbox - here on our app. So I’ve got the simulator - up and when we check it, it is going to run the code - down here that sets it to true and then runs - our trackAction, which sets NonStop Button - Interaction into our action name and then sends additional - data for NonStop equals on and when we turn it off, - just the opposite will happen and we will - set it to off. So I’ve already got - it up and running and so, all we really need - to do now is take a look, so I’m going to actually - drag this over here a little bit if I can and - bring up our debugger, and when I click that, - we’ll see that a hit comes in and we will see in this hit - that it has the parameters that are consistent - with a custom link hit or this trackAction hit, - where you’ll have a page event or PE variable - set to lnk_o and then, we also have - the other parts of it, which is again, - our NonStop Button Interaction, that is what was - set as our name. You can kinda see that back - in the background there, NonStop Button Interaction - and that comes in, not only as the action - that is happening here, but also in this page event - two or this pev2 variable for AMACTION:NonStop - Button Interaction. So those both come across - and then our additional data is right up here as - NonStop equals on. Now if I deselect it, - it sends in another hit, says NonStop equals - off and then of course, these are the - same down here, where it is interaction - with a NonStop Button. So these are the kinds - of things that you’ll see and that additional - data will come across in a context data block. So you’ll see here, - this context data block, that we have some Adobe - Lifecycle information here and then we also have - the context data, in this case, just that - extra one key value pair. And so, - that is how you use trackAction, hope that was - helpful, good luck. -