Recently I’ve watched a live webinar where Adobe has shared some details about the new tag management system, called Adobe Launch. Although Launch is not available for production, yet, it is worth familiarizing it, as the feature offering of Launch is very impressive.
- What do I need a dynamic tag management capability?
A marketing tag is a small piece of (usually Javascript or HTML) code injected into a web page. Almost all web pages use such tags, for example: analytics, advertisements, A/B testing or personalization code. Without using DTM solutions, those small pieces of code have to be hard coded into the sources of the web site (or other custom solutions needed to be used) and – in the worst case – the entire web site has to be released and deployed in order to see the new piece of code published.
A dynamic tag management system is a tool that allows marketers deploying marketing tags into a web site at any time or altering already deployed tags without having to turn to the development team. This is a really powerful capability!
For example, when there is a drop in the conversion rate following a release or content change, the marketers can easily alter the tracking tags to get better insights.
- So what is Adobe Launch? We had DTM already. Does it replace DTM?
Well, I don’t know if DTM will be deprecated or replaced by Launch (Adobe says they won’t deprecate DTM). However I see some clear benefits of Launch.
The number of digital marketing solutions double every year and legacy tag management systems just can’t keep up with it.
Adobe’s response to that seems to be the soon-to-be-released Adobe Launch. Here is what I found out so far about the new offering:
Rule creation will be much easier. It will follow an if, then syntax, so the rules will be actually human readable.
With Launch, Adobe will introduce the concept of extensions, so that new marketing solutions can be integrated and the Launch UI can be customized accordingly. Scripts used often or a 3rd party can be extracted into an extension with a tailored Launch UI to deploy them faster and easier.
They introduce the app store concept – open for ISVs to contribute – so that marketers can use extensions added by others – instead of building their own integration or waiting for Adobe to provide integration OOTB.
The UI of Launch is more intuitive, marketers can use it easier. The UI is also customizable.
DTM won’t be deprecated, but there will be a migration path to Launch. A migration tool is coming soon (to export DTM elements and import into Launch).
Adobe Launch is in Alpha phase. Beta coming soon.
Related resources:
https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/legacy-dtm-and-the-new-launch-a-closer-first-look/
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/dtm/
