I had a slightly shocking, and certainly eye-opening moment a month ago or so. I was chatting with Cornell, who is not only my colleague, but also probably the best Target consultant I know. He shocked me by casually saying that he thinks the future of A/B testing and targeting is server-side. As a developer, … Continue reading The Era of Server-side Everything
Author: 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.
Quick Tip – Experience Cloud direct URLs
I'm at Summit in Las Vegas this week, but the little robots behind this blog will post this anyway. And if you want to meet, let me know! The quick tip today is indeed a very quick quick tip. Just one sentence, really: You can access some of the solutions in the Experience Cloud directly! … Continue reading Quick Tip – Experience Cloud direct URLs
Switch off DTM server-side
There's a monster hiding under our beds right now, called "GDPR". Since I am not a lawyer, I will not write about GDPR, but I'll happily use it as bait. 😉 Seriously, though, GDPR is a great reminder that in our business (analytics, optimisation, but actually the web in general), privacy is a topic, and … Continue reading Switch off DTM server-side
Project Management, Development, and Analytics
Note: this article is relevant for you if you have ever, or are likely to participate in a bigger project that includes building the platform as well as deploying Analytics, Target, Audience Management, or similar tools. I think it is relevant for developers as well as project managers. Often, we Analytics people are tasked with … Continue reading Project Management, Development, and Analytics
Dynamic Variables – still a thing?
In April 2013, I wrote about "Dynamic Variables", a mechanism that helps remove duplication in the tracking URLs, making the tracking requests potentially shorter. Even at the time, the original reason for doing so was no longer a show stopper: Internet Explorer up to version 9 had the annoying habit of not requesting any URLs … Continue reading Dynamic Variables – still a thing?
Data Quality & Testing – Some Thoughts from Others
I want to share two articles with you that I felt nicely threw spotlights on testing. The first one, called TDD & "Professionalism" (I love that title!) by Jason Gorman, builds a Venn diagram based on 4 values, or 4 corner stones of what the author calls "professional". A "professional" "doesn't ship untested code", "doesn't … Continue reading Data Quality & Testing – Some Thoughts from Others
Launch – Make an Extension – Debugging
Here comes part 3 of the mini series on "Making a Launch Extension". We looked at the setup and the coding. Today we discuss debugging. I'm sure you are way better than me when it comes to writing HTML and Javascript, but I'm also sure whatever you write is unlikely to work first time round. … Continue reading Launch – Make an Extension – Debugging
Launch – Make an Extension – Coding
Part 2 of the "Make a Launch Extension" mini series is about the actual coding. You can find the other parts here: setup, debug, publish. This article is split in two parts, aligned with the two different parts the extension has to provide: UI and actual JS code. Let's start with the UI. UI Your … Continue reading Launch – Make an Extension – Coding
Launch – Make an Extension – Setup
Welcome to part 1 of our mini series of "Make a Launch Extension". This part is about the setup. There are (or will be) parts on coding, debugging, and eventually on publishing the extension.. node.js / npm Before you can start developing a Launch Extension, you need to install node.js. I will not go into … Continue reading Launch – Make an Extension – Setup
Launch Extensions – Overview
Launch, the successor of DTM, comes with a lot of APIs and is a lot more modular than DTM. You can add functionality to Launch via so-called "Extensions". Extensions can be used by your friendly marketer or anyone else using Launch to add new capabilites to the tag management setup. The idea is to encapsulate … Continue reading Launch Extensions – Overview
Web Analytics for Developers 