The Digital Marketing Architect

I have had to recently help a customer with the integration of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with Adobe Launch. If you have been following this blog for a while, you already know that my area of expertise is not precisely AEM, so I had to do the whole process to learn it first. To keep it handy for the future, I thought I would share the experience with all of you.

This post is going to be very different from those I usually write. Instead of talking about Adobe technology or related topics, today I want to explain how I became an architect in the Adobe consulting organisation. This came as a suggestion from a colleague, in case others would like to follow the same path.

At beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post on a cookie-less web. In it, I explained where did this witch hunt against the cookies come from and what would the (expected) next chapter in this drama be. However, a recent plot twist has sent ripples, which have been felt in every corner of the Internet.

Every time I check the Adobe Analytics reports of this blog, the most visited post is How to debug an Adobe Analytics implementation. That post was written back in 2016 and, in technology, 5 years is an eternity. More importantly, one of my recommendations does not exist anymore. It is time to update that post and to talk about the successor of the Adobe Debugger: the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Debugger.

Last week, a reader left a comment in my post on Declared IDs, asking for ideas on how to capture more or better 1st party data. As the world inches towards a cookie-less web, this is a challenge I see with more customers. The problem is that not all websites are created equal.

Last year, Adobe released a framework (not exactly a new product), called Project Firefly. I barely noticed it when it was announced. However, one of my customers requested me a very specific feature, for which Firefly was the perfect tool. Although it has been ages since I last did any serious development, it was a good opportunity to learn this new tool. This is an introduction to this tool and, in future posts, I will get into more details.

As I said at the very bottom of my 2020 Retrospective post, one of my personal projects for 2021 was to migrate this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. I am not sure there was a clear goal, I just thought it would be fun. With all the time that I have spent at home during this long British winter in lockdown, it has been a distraction that has kept my mind busy. Finally, after so long and so much time invested, here it is. I hope you like it!

A few weeks ago I heard of a conversation between Adobe and a customer about server-side implementations of web analytics and optimisation tools. In this case, the problem was that some vendor was misleading our customer. Well, actually, this vendor blatantly lied. I wanted to explain this situation so that none of my readers fall into this trap.

When people talk or think about Adobe Analytics, the first idea that comes to their minds tends to be “reporting”. In fact, this idea applies to any visualisation tool. However, this is only half of the story. Many forget that these tools actually have another, very important, capability: data analysis.

You all know that Adobe Analytics has an out-of-the-box solution to track download links. It just works and few people even care about it. You may not know that you can even extend its functionality, by adding additional eVars/props/events to the server call. Not very common, but I had to do it for one client. However, what happens when someone downloads content through a direct link or you have a server-side implementation?

This is the second part of a 2-part series on consent management. The first part was an introduction to the concept of consent management, where I explained what a Consent Management Platform (CMP) is, some legal implications and introduced Adobe’s solution. In this second part, I will show you how to configure the Adobe Opt In service feature in Adobe Launch.

From being completely ignored to becoming a legal requirement, consent management is now a mandatory part of all website implementations. Until not that long ago, Adobe tools did not have a satisfactory solution. Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager had a different way of managing it. However, with the ECID service, you now have a centralised option to manage all tools. This is the first post of a 2-post series, where I will explain how to configure the Adobe Opt-In mechanism.

So you have finally decided to start a project with the AEP Web SDK and Adobe has provisioned it for you. There are now quite a few steps you need to take, so I will go one by one. While you could start in many places, I will start with the edge configuration.

The Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK was introduced some time ago. I do not remember exactly when, but I have not had the time to work with it until very recently. Now that I have finally started to get my hands dirty with it, I will start writing about it. However, before I get into the how, I want to start with the why and the what.

In the last 3 months I have been working on a project where the star is Marketo. It has been a great experience for me, as I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about this tool. So I thought I would share with you my newly acquired knowledge.

I wanted to start 2021 with a view of the future, probably trying to forget the past. At least, with my personal view on an important point that will affect us all in the digital marketing world soon. Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you already know that there is a death sentence over browser cookies. It all started with Apple’s crusade against 3rd party cookies, but later Google committed to remove these cookies completely by 2022 from its browser. Let me explain what I think will happen.

My colleague Jan Exner has the habit of writing a retrospective in his last post of the year. He is not the only one, Datanalyst.info has done it from time to time. I have never written any such post, but I think it is a good idea. This is my first attempt. Hope you like it!

Many years ago, my grandmother told me that she did not understand why I received a salary for spending the whole day behind a computer. In comparison, my grandfather had been a captain in cargo ships and a pilot. Although I did not ask her what troubled her, I assumed that, for her, a computer was just another machine and mainly for gaming. To make money, you had to do “something”.

As I explained in my post on metrics and and dimensions in Adobe Analytics, events (or custom events) are the way to track metrics. In general, you want a metric to increase or decrease depending on the user’s behaviour. However, you may only want it to happen under certain circumstances. More importantly, you do not want to write complex code to manage that.

A year ago I wrote about Declared IDs. I briefly mentioned then an issue that arises with setting these IDs: lazy loading and Adobe Target. However, I know that I did not explain too much about the issue. In this post I will get into more detail.