Create data elements

Learn how to create data elements in tags for content, commerce, and identity data on the Luma demo site. Then populate fields in your XDM schema with the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK extension Variable data element type.

Learning objectives

At the end of this lesson, you are able to:

Prerequisites

You have an understanding of what a data layer is and have completed the previous lessons in the tutorial:

IMPORTANT

The data for this lesson comes from the digitalData data layer on the Luma site. To view the data layer, open your developer console and type in digitalData to see the full data layer available.

Data layer approaches

There are multiple ways to map data from your data layer to XDM using the tags functionality of Adobe Experience Platform. Below are a few pros and cons of three different approaches. It is possible to combine approaches, if desired:

Implement XDM in the data layer

This approach involves using the fully defined XDM object as the structure for your data layer. Then you map the entire data layer to an XDM object data element in tags. If your implementation is not using a tag manager, this approach may be ideal because you can send data to XDM directly from your application using the XDM sendEvent command. If you do use tags, you can create a custom code data element capturing the entire data layer as a pass-through JSON object to the XDM. Then, you map the pass-through JSON to the XDM object field in the Send Event Action.

Below is an example of how the data layer would look like using the Adobe Client Data Layer format:

window.adobeDataLayer.push({
"eventType": "web.webPageDetails.pageViews",
"web":{
         "webInteraction":{
            "linkClicks":{
               "id":"",
               "value":""
            },
            "URL":"",
            "name":"",
            "region":"",
            "type":""
         },
         "webPageDetails":{
            "pageViews":{
               "id":"",
               "value":"1"
            },
            "URL":"https://luma.enablementadobe.com/",
            "isErrorPage":"",
            "isHomePage":"",
            "name":"luma:home",
            "server":"enablementadobe.com",
            "siteSection":"home",
            "viewName":""
         },
         "webReferrer":{
            "URL":"",
            "type":""
         }
      }
});

Pros

Cons

Map data layer in tags

This approach involves mapping individual data layer variables OR data layer objects to data elements in tags and eventually to XDM. This is the traditional approach to implementation using a tag management system.

Pros

Cons

Map to XDM in the datastream

This approach uses functionality built-into the datastream configuration called Data Prep for Data Collection and skips mapping data layer variables to XDM in tags.

Pros

Cons

Create data elements to capture the data layer

Before you create the XDM object, create the following set of data elements for the Luma demo site data layer:

Create these additional data elements by following the same steps:

Create Variable data elements for XDM and data objects

The data elements you just created will be used to build an XDM object (for Platform applications) and a data object (for Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager). These objects have their own special data elements called Variable data elements which are very easy to create.

To create the Variable data element for XDM, you tie it to the schema you created in the Configure a schema lesson:

Next, create the Variable data element for your data object:

At the end of these steps, you should have the following data elements created:

With these data elements in place, you are ready to start sending data to Platform Edge Network with a tags rule. But first, learn about collecting identities with Web SDK.

Next: Create identities