From Real-Time Multi-ID User Stitching to Triggering Flexible Actions — The number of vendors claiming to offer a Customer Data Platform (CDP) has skyrocketed. From e-mail specialists to tag management providers — as long as a product used to offer something with customer data and had some APIs for data input and output, it now is likely called a “CDP”…

Get to a consistent, manageable setup of your eVars, props, Success Events, and Classifications, including Version Control — Have you seen any “Multiples” lately? Do they make you nervous, too? Then you must be an Adobe Analytics Admin. This post explains how to set up your Report Suites in a maintainable way. We also show how to compare the values behind those “Multiples” more efficiently. …

Heavenly and Devilish Examples of Server-Side Tracking — Server-side tracking, especially in the form of server-side Tag Management, is one of the hottest trends in Digital Analytics and Marketing. This article gives an introduction and highlights the potential for good and bad. And when did “first-party data” mutate into an irony of itself? [Note: I do not intend…

The account usage logs of Adobe Analytics offer a lot of cool data to monitor if the Digital Analytics team is doing their job. However, they are not without pitfalls. A Project View may not be what you think it is. How fresh is the data? And how do you…

How to Measure User Adoption of your Adobe Analytics Setup and Prevent Co-Workers from Churning — Am I doing a good job in terms of user adoption of Adobe Analytics at my organization? Which co-workers are starting to lose interest? Which ones are emerging Power Users? Which data topics deserve more attention, i.e. enhanced reporting & tracking? …

Enable easy-to-read Debug Output to Console on all Browsers for the most relevant stages of Data Layer Processing — There are a number of decent Tealium debuggers out there. Nevertheless, simple-minded and mentally challenged as I am, I tend to prefer a simple debug output directly to the browser console. Browser extensions just don’t work in all browsers and have a negative impact on page speed.

“Hard” & “Soft” Bots, Human Signals — and Vacation in Cleveland — Recap: Why common Bot combat methods aren’t good enough for Analytics In part I, we looked at common Bot Detection / Filtering methods. We concluded they are not what we really need for common Web Analytics solutions like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, but also for UX tools (e.g. Hotjar), trackers from ad networks (Google Ads/Facebook/etc.), pricing or AB testing tools…

With Examples from Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics — This is part I of the never-ending story on how to deal with Bots in your Analytics data. I review common, yet usually insufficient or even completely failing approaches. Why did I give up on AI-driven solutions like ReCaptcha, Akamai Bot Manager or Ad Fraud Detection tools? How good are…

And why having all in one parameter is key — I have accompanied many an organization in designing their Campaign URL Parameter Naming Convention (“UTM parameter convention” for those out there with Google Analytics tunnel vision). What is the same everywhere: No naming convention is perfect. Nobody likes to do it. You can spend months discussing which attributes should be…