Add and configure tag extensions

In this video. We’ll explain what an extension is and tags and how to install them on your properties. We’ll also cover some commonly used extensions and how they’re used in typical implementations. An extension is a package of functionalities that you can add to your tag rolls, which can include the kinds of events they can listen for. Types of data elements they can reference, and the kinds of actions they can take in response. In practice, each extension allows you to integrate your tagging implementation with another application or technology. There are extensions available for different Adobe products like Analytics, Target and campaign, as well as a wide range of third party applications for a variety of use cases. Letting you send data to these applications or use their capabilities directly in your tag rules. By using extensions, developers can avoid having to untangle webs of custom code whenever they need to make changes to the different product integrations your company uses to track, process and analyze customer behavior across its digital properties. So let’s hop into the tags interface and install some extensions for a web property. Once we’ve chosen the property we want to work on. Click extensions in the left navigation. Here we see the core extension, which is the default extension that’s automatically installed with every property. All the basic types of data elements and rule components that are native to tags are contained in this extension. Like with all installed extensions, we can click on its listing here and then select configure in the right now to edit the basic settings for the extension. Since this is the basic core extension, there’s not much to adjust here. Other than providing a content security policy nonce to authenticate your tagging scripts if your website requires one. But when we start building rules, all of the available data, elements, events and actions that we want to add to our rules will either come from this extension or the others that we manually install on this property. Let’s close out of this view for now and then click the catalog tab. And here we have a list of all the different extensions that are available for us to install. Note that these extensions are all specific to web implementations since we’re currently working from a web property. If we are working on a mobile property or an event forwarding property, we’d see an entirely different list here. There are dozens of available public extensions for each property type and more are being added all the time. These extensions have been built by Adobe Consulting, by partners and by third party vendors so that their products will work smoothly with tags. Your developers can also build custom extensions that are exclusive to your organization to meet any implementation needs that aren’t covered by the public extensions alone. While we can browse through the catalog until we find the extensions we need, we can also use the search bar on the top left to find a specific extension if we happen to know the name. For web properties, one important extension you’ll want to use is the Experience Platform Web SDK. This extension allows you to directly stream customer event data from the client side of your website to multiple Experience Cloud applications and real time using a single library. All data collected by the SDK is mapped to a standard schema structure called Experienced Data Model or X Team and is then sent to products like analytics, Target and Experience Platform through data streams that you own and configure. The SDK is also used to send data to service side destinations using event forwarding. So let’s go ahead and install the extension on this property. I’ll click install in the right rail and I’m brought to the configuration page. Each extension has its own set of configuration options and requirements, and as you can see, we have a lot of inputs here compared to what we saw on the core extension earlier. Some settings have been filled out automatically. Like these first few fields that control how the SDK will be invoked on our web page. And in most cases we don’t need to change this further below, though we do have some settings that we need to configure manually. For example, we need to choose the data streams for our different environments so the extension knows where to send our data depending on where the event is firing. So for production, we’d select the sandbox, the data stream is located and then we choose the data stream itself in the list and then repeat these steps for our other environments as needed. For details on how to create and manage data streams and other concepts related to using the case and Experience Platform Edge Network in general, please refer to the data collection documentation. Once we’re done configuring the extension, click Save. Another web SDK appears in our list of installed extensions. If we go over to the rules section and start creating a new rule, you can see that when I opened the dialog to add an action, the platform web SDK is available as an option and the extension dropdown when I select it. The action type dropdown will include the different kinds of actions that the extension provides, including the all important send event which actually forwards the data you want to send to your configured data streams. If I go over to add an event to the role, there are some additional event types that I can pick from the web SDK extension. And if we hop over the data elements, we have some new SDK specific options to choose from here as well. So to summarize, while different extensions will make different functionalities available to your tag properties in general, each extension is set up in the same way. First, there are the general configuration settings for the extension that we set up when installing it on our property. These settings are specific to the property that we install it on and can be altered as needed after it’s been added. And secondly, extensions typically provide new types of components that you can add to your rules, which can include any combination of events, conditions, actions or data elements. And the behavior of these components are influenced by the general configuration settings between all these configuration options. Each extension will have its own set of requirements and best practices depending on the technology it integrates with. So be sure to consult the documentation for the extension that you’re working with before making changes. So that was a basic rundown of extensions and tags, including how to install them on your properties and use their capabilities in your rules. Keep in mind that we only covered the web extension here and that each property type has its own catalog of available extensions between web, mobile and event forwarding. All combined, there are a ton of public extensions you can use for both Adobe products and third party platforms. And in addition to these public extensions, your developers can also create custom private extensions that enable your tags implementation with the exact capabilities you require while mitigating development overhead. Thanks for watching.