The concept of a DMP (Data Management Platform) is not new in the digital marketing arena. However, there are still many marketers who do not know of this type of platform and what it can do for them. I will explain what is a DMP and what is Adobe Audience Manager.

Some time ago, I received an urgent call from a customer that claimed that DTM broke their website. They wanted to see me immediately, as that was causing a huge impact in them. Fortunately, the problems only manifested in staging, but they could not move to production. Once I arrived at my client’s office, I immediately realised what had happened: the data analyst had created some data elements using JavaScript he found on the Internet and he just copied and pasted the code. The code worked on his computer, so he went to approve and publish it. The reality was that his code only worked in IE and crashed in other browsers.

When creating both page load rules and event based rules in DTM, you have the option of configuring some conditions to determine when to fire those rules: parts of the URL, cookies, browser properties, JavaScript variables… If you add more than one condition, the AND boolean operator is applied to all conditions. However, in some cases, these out-of-the-box conditions are not enough. Thankfully, DTM offers the custom condition, where you can write pure JavaScript.

A few months ago, I was working with a customer on premise and the manager asked me a tricky question: how to organise the analytics team. That company was undergoing significant changes in the analytics front, as a few key members of this team were leaving. As with most questions in life, there is not a clear and definitive answer to this particular one. However, I can share what I have been seeing in my customers.

After publishing my previous post, where I recommended tracking the s_code version, I realised it could have been enhanced with a new type of version to track. Another version number that is even more useful is the sprint reference or whichever value you use to track each of the releases of the website. This idea came from one of my customers (thanks Glenn), who is under the process of redeveloping the whole website and analytics implementation. If you either have a development team that is continously adding new features to the web or are in profoundly redeveloping the website, you want to know the ROI of this invesment.

One of the suggestions I usually did when I worked with a new client was to track the s_code version. Now that we are moving to DTM, we do not have any more the concept of the s_code, but we have the concept of publishing new rules, which is similar to an s_code version. The idea is to keep a value in a prop, which is changed every time a new s_code is pushed live or a new set of rules is published. My typical suggestion is to add both a date and a version to the string.

Back in the old days, the only way to add Web analytics code to a website, was through manual coding. If you were using Adobe Analytics, you would need to add two pieces of code into the website: the s_code and the on-page code. The s_code is a JavaScript file with common code for Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst) and the on-page code contains the page-specific data.