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 …
Category: Principles
Articles that explain general concepts and principles behind web analytics and Adobe Analytics
Always deploy DTM production libraries
No beating about the bush this time, I'll just spit out what I have to say: There is no reason to embed DTM staging libraries anywhere, like, ever! I don't actually think this is controversial, more of an example of what I heard a colleague say the other day: "common sense" and "common practice" are …
Bad Data – Prevention & other Aspects
Someone asked me the other day: if I cannot currently run tests to improve data quality, is there anything else I can do to make my data better? Now there's a good question! The obvious, easy, and somewhat lame answer is: well, why can't you run tests? You'd be able to catch and prevent, like, …
CSP and the Experience Cloud
There is a new kid on the block of web security: Content Security Policy, or CSP. It is not actually that new, but people start using it in earnest, and I have over the past months have had a couple of questions about how CSP influences Analytics and other parts of the Experience Cloud. So …
![[screenshot]](https://webanalyticsfordevelopers.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/170801-maint-aa-update-avail.png?w=900)
Maintenance
The cool thing about Analytics, from the point of view of a developer: once you have set it up, it is completely maintenance-free! Fire and forget! Or is it? The truth is that a) "once you have set it up" is not the way I would describe Analytics (or other things like targeting, personalisation, testing, …
Quick tip: Tracking Server & SSL
(I mentioned two weeks ago that I sometimes blog because I want to learn and/or remember things. This is one of those articles.) Whether you are a regular reader or just generally interested, I'm sure you know that most (if not all) analytics tools these days work by sending "tracking calls", "hits", "beacons", or whatever …
Tracking 404 Error Pages
There are tools out there that find bogus links on your site, and some even try to find links outside your site that point to nirvana. But your friendly marketer likely wants to have better data than that, so she asks you to build tracking for 404 pages. Now what? Let me explain, both for …
Privacy with DTM
I am no lawyer, and I do not want to go into any legal or even ethical or moral aspects of EU privacy law. Let's just say this for our American friends: people in the EU do not like to know they're being marketed to. Mostly. They also fear Google more than their own government, …
![[Screenshot]](https://webanalyticsfordevelopers.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/160802-rsid-dtm-official.png?w=900)
Dynamic Report Suite ID with DTM
Adobe Analytics has always had a feature that allowed you to dynamically set the Report Suite ID (rsid). It works with a list of domains, matched against the current domain automatically. See dynamic accounts in the Marketing Cloud Help. Nevertheless, traditionally, people have built their own code to set s_account before loading the s_code.js file. …
DTM – Data Elements that persist
Who here can explain to me what exactly it means to set the "Remember this value for" setting of a Data Element in DTM to anything else but "Page View"? I can confidently tell you that right now, I have no idea. Which is of course a perfect excuse to a) find out and b) …
