DTM to Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) Migration Questions and Answers

You asked, we answered. Below is a transcript of the DTM to Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) Q&A round we had during the webinar. Don’t hesitate to reach out with further questions and contact us for help during your DTM to Tags migration.

How can we migrate to Tags without touching the development cycle or without actually touching the code?

While in DTM – use the migration button (under publish) and one of the options is to continue using the same script URL – that allows you to migration without a code change. Note: you won’t be able to move to async if you go with this approach.

What are the disadvantages of asynchronous loading? Can we do asynchronous if we are using target?

Adobe provides a ‘pre-hiding’ snippet that has to be added on the page (can’t be deployed through Tags) which allows async Target to work. Not a lot of ‘disadvantages’ but moving to async alters your page load order and need to watch out how you’re managing order and assumptions.

How does “upgrade to Tags” button works in DTM tool?

It creates a new property in Tags and creates rules/data elements/extensions that match DTM as closely as possible. There isn’t always a 1 to 1 so make sure to play for QA and validation, but in many situations, it works quite well.

Why are there many warnings and errors especially with iframes when migrating custom 3rd party non-sequential JavaScript and HTML from DTM to Tags?

Unlike DTM, Tags doesn’t use iFrames or HTML types – so you’ll have to rewrite to use JS in the main window.

When build got failed we got the error in the dialog box but it didn’t specify in which rule we are getting error. It makes difficult for debugging.

I agree and Adobe is aware of this (I’ve bugged them about this personally) but there isn’t currently a way around this. You can narrow it down by removing changes from the library and try building again.

Which tool is suggested to use for automation testing?

If you don’t have your own automation framework, ObservePoint is a tool that can be utilized for testing. It has several features to speed up the testing activities and monitoring.

How to implement video metrics in Tags?

It depends on your video player. All modern player have a client-side JS API that you can hook into to listen for events like play/complete/etc – you’ll simply deploy your code via Tags. There might also be some HTML5 video helpers, but I haven’t used those personally.

What was major key differences between DTM and Tags?

The core code was reworked under the hood & better UI – but the biggest changes were the async option.

What in your opinion makes Tags better than DTM?

Better UI experience, more robust library/environments, leaner, faster, and async.

What is the best way to add multiple rules/data elements while going ahead with the first build after migration triggered from DTM to Tags?

Create a new library and then ‘add all changes resources’ and build.

Yeah but when we create another new dev environment and would like to get in only specific set of rules or data elements it is challenging because we need to add one by one item .. is there a better way?

There is no other way but either adding one change at a time or adding all changes and removing the ones you do not want. We recommend the latter.

How much time it takes to migrate from DTM to Tags?

It depends on the size of the site, the amount of custom code in DTM, and what your goals are. We have seen some go in weeks, and others in months.

What are steps to consider while migrating to make sure there is no data loss?

Set up alerts and check reports for data. Run the Analytics Health dashboard to check data in reports.

Is there anything that you miss about DTM? that doesn’t exist in Tags?

Rejecting a change in DTM would revert the change to the previous version. In Tags, if you reject a change from a build the last change stays floating around. We would like to see this as a feature enhancement.

I need to know where Jean-Paul got his “best friends 4eVar” shirt!

We created it, thanks for asking! We will reach out to you so we can ship one. We will try to figure out something for the future if more people are interested in the T’s.