Part 1 - Getting started with Adobe Analytics - Terminologies and Report Suite creation
This blog is the first in a three part series.
In this blog series, we will learn how to get started on capturing events to Adobe Analytics(AA). Adobe Analytics is the industry-leading analytics solution to track website and mobile app performance. While we use AA to analyse the captured data, the tagging to capture the web data is done through Adobe Launch, aka Data Collection. Launch can be used to send data not just to AA, but to other Adobe Experience services such as Target, Campaign,as well as to third party analytics such as Google Analytics
Adobe Launch terminologies
- Property: Property in Launch is where you keep all the tagging information for a single website or multiple websites.
- Report suite: Report suite is a data bucket that receives the analytics data you send from your digital properties. Adobe analytics reports are in turn pulled from this data.
- Data element: Data elements are Launch variables which you can define once and reuse multiple times in rules and in custom code. Data elements are recommended as best practice due to their reusability. If you want to use the data elements in javascript, name the data elements using camel case.
- Rules: Rules allow you to specify what should happen as the visitor interacts with your website. Using rules, you specify what actions should be triggered under what conditions.
- Launch extensions: Launch extensions are mainly used to create integrations with other applications. Adobe Analytics extension enables Launch to send data to Adobe Analytics.
- Library: A Library is a collection of resources (Extensions, Rules, and Data Elements) that represent the desired behaviour of a Property. The publishing process in Launch consists of building a Library, testing the resulting Build in an Environment, and promoting that Library to the next stage of the process until it finally reaches the Production Environment.
Optional Requirements
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In this series, we use the demo site provided by Adobe. If you are an Adobe solution partner, you can login to solutionpartners.adobe.com and search for “Geometrix training site” and download it.
Alternatively, go to this URL
and download the “Geometrixx Implementation Site with Data Layer”. I have unzipped the downloaded file and renamed it to geometrix_demo
- Webserver for Chrome - We use this Chrome extension to run the website in our local host.
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Omnibug- We use this Chrome extension to verify our Launch implementation
All these are optional. You can complete this tutorial by tagging any test website to which you have developer access. We recommend Omnibug for its easy user interface. However, you can use any other debugging tool or just the network tab of the developer console.
Creating a report suite
Having a report suite is mandatory to implement Adobe Analytics.
Login to experience.adobe.com and go to Analytics
Go to the Admin->Admin tools. Click on the “New” next to Report Suites option.
You can create a new report suite using the default template. Report suite id cannot be changed after it is created. Go live date gives Adobe timeline to set up the proper hardware to store our data. Estimated page views per day lets Adobe estimate how much server/storage is needed. These are not critical for the demo report suite we are creating provided it does not attract huge traffic.
Now click on Create Report Suite to complete the report suite creation. Now that we have created a demo report suite, we will implement Adobe analytics using Adobe Launch in our next blog.
Related Articles
Part 2 - Getting started with Adobe Analytics - tagging website using Adobe Launch
Part 3 - Getting started with Adobe Analytics - capturing data using Adobe Launch
Implementing Adobe Analytics for Gatsby site