With DTM you don’t need Data Elements

~ Jan Exner

Slight deviation this week, but we’re still on the path to glory a setup of Adobe Analytics and Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) that is as close to perfection as possible.

The deviation today has to do with a question I was asked about a month ago: how can I track an attribute of a clicked element using an Event Based Rule?

Event Based Rule

Remember: DTM is based on rules. You have rules that fire on page load and rules that can be executed when something happens on the page.

The latter are called Event Based Rules and they are powerful for custom link tracking and for dynamic sites that use a lot of AJAX and DOM manipulation.

Event Based Rules, like all rules, allow you to set Adobe Analytics “variables”. You can use Data Elements for that, for example. This is great with a Data Layer, but I think I have mentioned that before.

For the question above, the real puzzler was: how do you make a Data Element that refers to some attribute of the clicked element?

And it turns out: you don’t have to!

%this%

The official documentation on Global Variables in DTM spells out an example that is interesting under the heading “Dynamically Populate Variables”:

[Screenshot]
From the Documentation: Dynamically Populate Variables
The example assigns the “id” of the clicked element to eVar1.

For that, it uses a syntax that is very close to how you access Data Elements. In fact, the syntax is exactly the same:

	eVar1="%this.id%"

I can assure you that “%this.id%” is not a Data Element that I built. This is built-in functionality.

So I had to play around with that a little bit.

Say I wanted to track the class of the element that surrounds whatever I clicked on. Turns out that is possible:

	prop41="%this.parentElement.className%"

This is the rule:

[Screenshot]
Rule Setting for prop41
The HTML looks like this:
[Screenshot]
The HTML used for testing
(Yes, that is not nicely indented. Thank you, PHP. And yes, I am using ZURB Foundation)When I click the text, I see this:

[Screenshot]
The resulting Tracking Call
Pretty cool, isn’t it?I haven’t tried to find out where the limits are. Neither have I tried to go beyond them. I hope someone else will, and I hope that someone will share their experiences and results!

The quest for perfection will continue in 2015. For now, switch off your machines and brains. Have a good time off and a quiet time with your families!

Published by Jan Exner

German expat living in Switzerland (formerly UK and France). Consultant and member of the Multi-Solutions Group at Adobe, working with the Digital Marketing Suite. Father of 4 girls.

15 thoughts on “With DTM you don’t need Data Elements”

  2. Hi Jan,
    wish you a happy and succesful new year first and ‘that is as close to perfection as possible’ sounds very good, so I’m looking forward to our project 😉 BTW: %this% is pretty cool 😉

    Like

    Reply

  3. Hey Jan, not even sure where to begin to google for this so I thought to ask you. Have you ever set more than one data element to a variable?

    Example: From DTM, I set %country%:%language% to a variable (say, evar5) and it seems to work – it loads “ca:en: to my evar5

    just wondering if there is a catch to this?

    Like

    Reply

    1. Hi Matt,

      iframes make everything more difficult indeed. Loading content in an iframe is almost the same, technically, as loading it in a different browser.

      If you really want to track your videos, it also makes sense to instrument the player, rather than using the embedded Youtube player.

      This is a piece of work, and it might not be worth it, depending on your site.

      One alternative would be to use the YT-provided numbers. As for using DTM, I have to ask around a little bit…

      Like

      Reply

  5. Jan what would be the %this.####% value here if I’m wanting to grab the value between the .

    Thanks

    “If you are positive, if you want to help people, if you’ve got ideas then you can come and you can do it.” Find out what you could learn from a Raleigh expedition in this video from Tanzania.

    Like

    Reply

  6. Congratulation for your blog, I’ve discovered it few days ago and I’m very happy to catch a new source of tech information about DTM.

    Concerning data element and event based rule, we can consider that we don’t have to use data element but it is better in a lot of cases for factorization purposes.

    The challenge is to workaround the fact that DTM data element doesn’t manage “Click Element” and you have to do the job differently (contrary du GTM as example).

    The way I find to do it after several tests (sometimes I’m angry with the Adobe documentation…because too light):
    To factorize attributes scrapping, I transmit my clicked element from the rule to the data element using parametered signature.
    :))

    // click event based rule
    s.products = _satellite.getVar(‘clicked product’)(this);

    // custom js data element : clicked product
    return function(a) {
    return a.getAttribute(“data-product-category”)+”;”+a.getAttribute(“data-product-id”);
    }

    Like

    Reply
  7. Pingback: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) + Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) – Český Tuňák
  9. Pingback: With Launch, you don’t need doPlugins! – Part 4 – Web Analytics for Developers

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.