Benefits of Migrating from DTM to Adobe Launch II

Welcome back, if you’ve read Part 1 of our series on the Benefits of Migrating from DTM to Adobe Launch. If you’ve just found this article and haven’t read Part 1, fear not, it’s not a prerequisite reading. Just check out Part 1 after you finish reading this article to hear about other benefits of Adobe Launch.

These benefits can assist your team in making the decision to migrate from Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM) to Adobe’s new tag manager, Launch. In Part 1 we covered the timeline for Adobe DTM retirement, Event Listening/Detection Improvement, Asynchronous Delivery, Unlimited Development Environments, Release Cycles That Enforce Governance and Open Sourcing. Now, we’ll look at five more benefits that Adobe Launch gives teams.

Launch is Built for New Browsers

In order to keep up with the new advancement in technologies and platforms that deliver content to both web and mobile experiences, Launch has dropped support for older browsers and mobile operating systems. Adobe DTM hasn’t been updated and will not be upgraded in the future to support newer browsers and platforms. Here is the list of the browsers and OS supported:

• Chrome (latest)
• Safari (latest)
• Firefox (latest)
• Internet Explorer (9 and above)
• iOS 7+
• Android 4.4+

As Adobe Launch leverages the new technologies of the web browsers and platforms, it enables your team to be more efficient with capturing data, listening for events, and understanding what’s going on with a customer’s journey without such a heavy reliance on cookies.

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Improved Persistent Data Handling

As mentioned in the prior benefit about browser and platform support, Adobe Launch allows teams to take advantage of using web storage to have a more reliable, persistent data. Rather than relying on cookies, which can be cleared by the visitor or restricted due to security settings, Launch allows access to web storage.

Here’s how Launch persists data element values for each storage duration:

• Pageview: Data element values are held in a JavaScript variable inside the library. If the user navigates to a new page or refreshes the page, the value is discarded.
• Session: Data element values are persisted to Session Storage. When the browser tab is closed, the value is discarded.
• Visitor: Data element values are persisted to Local Storage. The value will be persisted indefinitely.

For more in-depth information on the difference between Launch and DTM’s handling of persistent data, check out “Data Persistence: From DTM to Launch” by Aaron Hardy .

Advanced JavaScript Delivery System with HTML Injection Improvements

Launch is an advanced JavaScript delivery system that evaluates conditions and executes actions to efficiently and effectively deploy client-side libraries and products. Adobe Launch enables companies to consistently capture, define, manage, and share data between marketing and advertising products from other vendors as well as from Adobe.

Currently, DTM has a feature that enables teams to place HTML-based tags on web pages. This feature is limited because the HTML is loaded through an iFrame. The disadvantage to this method is that the page you set the tag on would not explicitly include the page it is placed on. Further, this method can impact the tag’s function in providing the information it needs. Adobe Launch has improved upon this feature by injecting the HTML via JavaScript, so teams no longer need to worry about random iFrames showing up on their pages.

If-Then Statements

One of the more powerful benefits of Launch is the ability to create If-Then statements within the Rules you create. This can help with limiting the scope of where a tag, tool, or data is implemented or collected. You are now in control of whenever a marketing tag or tool triggers, this is great for Single Page Applications (SPA).

For example, perhaps your company runs a chatbot that enables customers to interact with customer service, but you only want that to appear during the purchase funnel of your site. With the If-Then statements, you can limit the process by saying “If” the page section/page name equals a specific value, “Then” deliver the chatbot tool and fire data collection specific to that engagement. This can help limit costs for your chatbot service if you are paying on a “hit” or “server call” basis.

Extensions

One of the biggest drawbacks of Adobe DTM is the lack of “pre-packaged” coding to implement marketing tools like Adobe Target or advertising tags like DoubleClick. Developers are left to create custom code and rely on memory to update that custom code whenever new updates were pushed down from the vendors.

Launch, with its more open-sourced nature (that we discussed in Part 1), has introduced the concept of extensions. Without getting too technical, these extensions are “pre-packaged” sets of code created by 3^rd party vendors that enable easier implementation and management within Launch. These extensions can be updated by the 3^rd party vendors and pushed into Launch. Your company can then choose to upgrade within your own timeline when the extension indicates an update is available.

No more custom code blocks and no more “having to remember” to update those custom code blocks! If you missed Part 1, catch up on the additional features by reading the full list of benefits from Migrating to Adobe Launch.

If you need help migrating to Adobe Launch, contact us to get started.