Go Beyond Pixels and Tags and Start Thinking Experiences

Even to deliver a single customer experience, businesses today rely on a vast ecosystem of complex and interdependent marketing technologies. This presents the need for them to unify these technologies and the data that passes through them so they can build the efficiencies to deliver a compelling experience faster. Adobe Experience Platform Launch is a next-generation tag management system designed to do all this, and more.

Simply put, Launch by Adobe provides users a simple way to deploy and manage all of the analytics, marketing, and advertising integrations necessary to power relevant customer experiences. Launch is gaining popularity among organizations mainly because it provides them high-quality integrations that are flexible, frequently updated, and even customizable. For the first time, marketers have an infrastructure flexible enough to accommodate new functionality, open enough to automate manual process using open APIs, and powerful enough to unify disparate technologies.

I’ve already helped a few customers migrate to Launch from their older tag management solutions and have experienced its robustness first-hand, especially in terms of managing the firing of Adobe-specific tags and other third-party scripts.

Third-party pixel implementation in Launch by Adobe

A third-party script or tag is a snippet of code that is deployed either on marketing landing pages or purchase funnels to attribute marketing campaigns to conversion activities.

Launch has a lot of third-party tags (see the following example) that are supported as extensions, which can be deployed via a user-friendly UI (user interface). The list is ever growing but there will always be a need to deploy third-party tags that won’t be available in the catalog.

As an example, the following is a screenshot from the Adobe Advertising Cloud extension UI that makes it very easy to deploy this pixel without writing any custom JavaScript.

This post shows how to deploy a third-party tag called PepperJam (not yet added to Launch) and covers the various steps needed to get it done successfully. Let’s take a look.

• Evaluate third-party tag deployment documentation: Typically, you will get a tag deployment or requirement documentation from your vendor. Once you get the third-party tag documentation from the agency or vendor, make sure to go through it to understand the JavaScript snippet — where the tag needs to fire, what attributes need to be passed, and how to test the snippet. These are some of the key questions that need to be answered before deploying any third-party tag.
• Capture all relevant metadata using data elements: In this case, your vendor will ask you to capture the currency code, order total, order ID, and a query string parameter called “clickid” that needs to be persisted for the visitor.

In the next two screenshots, we create two data elements. The first data element captures the order total by tying directly to a data layer or JSON attribute on the page called dataLayer.orderTotal.

The second data layer captures a query string parameter called “clickid” that needs to be persisted for the visitor. We have used the “Visitor” duration.

This post covers persistence in Launch in more detail.

• Create a rule: The first step in a Launch rule is to create an event. In this case, our event is page load and we are going to choose “DOM Ready” to fire this event. DOM (document object model) ready is an event which is executed when the document object model has loaded. The next step is to choose a condition. In our case, we want to fire the pixel on a page called activewear.html. You can validate the condition by putting in the URI (uniform resource identifier) in the Regular Expression Tester, as shown below.

• Deploy the third-party marketing pixel: The last step in the pixel implementation process is to add an action within the existing rule. We do that by clicking on “Open Editor” and pasting the JavaScript snippet provided by the vendor. Take note of the two highlighted data elements in the screenshot from the code snippet that have been manually added to the pixel to pass additional metadata. Finally, publish the Pepperjam pixel in Launch.

• Validate the marketing pixel: The final step is to validate the pixel in a browser. In the first of the following two screenshots, we can see that additional attributes (metadata), such as Amount and Click_ID, are populating based on the data elements tied to the data layer and query string parameter, respectively. The second screenshot shows that the Click_ID is still populated, even if the “clickid” query parameter is not populated in the URL, as we have created a visitor-based data element.

Note: Geometrixx Clothiers is a dummy site used for the purpose of demonstration.

Hope you find this post useful.