Introducing our new Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) extension: Activity Map Customizer

As consultants, we look for opportunities to leverage new technology and methodology to deliver a better experience for clients. Some of the areas we are constantly on the lookout for include cleaning up existing Adobe Analytics components and utilizing our knowledge of analytics implementation to help clients eliminate time spent on creating custom code.

Oftentimes we find the Activity Map module of Adobe Analytics either not being used by our clients to its full capability, or not used at all. If you are not familiar with Activity Map, it is an optional component of Adobe Analytics that helps you measure where on a page people are clicking on. It is perfect for answering questions like, “are visitors more likely to find page X by clicking on the top nav or left nav link? Is having a left nav useful for visitors or not?” Here is the documentation link from Adobe if you want to find out more about it.

Going back to the issue at hand, it does not come as a huge surprise. Out of the box, Activity Map is not very robust, and customizing Activity Map for its full potential is a challenging implementation task in itself that involves a good amount of coding. With this in mind, we want to ensure that Adobe Analytics users are not missing out on the values that Activity Map has to offer. Our answer to this takes form as an Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) extension called “Activity Map Customizer”, giving the ability to tailor Activity Map without the need of custom code. Instead, you can configure the module via the Launch UI, similar to how you already map data elements to eVars or props.

Results:

We took it out for spin with a client of ours to compare what Activity Map captured out-of-box vs. after being customized with the extension UI. We tracked 3 things: clicking on a navigation link, a body link, and an email link. See the table below;

As you can see the values became much more contextual and user friendly after using the extension. Regions have a breadcrumb context to where users clicked on, and the body link was replaced by an href instead of a truncated title. Email is no longer captured, preventing potential PII violation. More importantly, no custom code needed. To find out how we did it, let’s take a look at how the extension works :

Extension Configuration:

These are the steps needed to configure the extension

1. Create Data Elements and map to contextual click identifiers (aka DOM attributes)
   The Contextual DOM Attribute data element, included as part of this extension, captures information from the HTML markup in context to where the user clicked. This data element is flexible and provides several options for traversing, matching, and concatenating attribute values.
   • Configure DOM Traversal = how do you want to scrape data from the page? This will allow you to capture information and context to where user clicks
   • Match Criteria = what do you want to match? (aka CSS selector). Note this does support selector syntax, meaning it can be complex as you want
   • Value Construction = what do you want to do with the value? we can choose what we want to do with the values
     • Include only closest value
     • Include the furthest value
     • Include all values and concatenate them together using a delimiter
   
2. Add an Activity Map configuration action to a rule
   Applying a custom Activity Map configuration is as simple as adding an additional action to a page view rule for tracking Adobe Analytics page views. When the Set Configuration action is used, it will override the out-of-the-box Activity Map settings. This custom configuration will apply to any interactions that happen on that page. You have the ability to configure both the Link and the Region from this UI.

   Link/Region definition: You can prioritize which data elements need to be configured and used for either Activity Link or Region. For Region, the extension also provides a section to configure Fallback elements and breadcrumb. So if you highest priority region is null, it will look for the next one in line to populate the Region.

   
3. Tailor the configuration to meet your needs
   You can adjust how both the Activity Map Link and Region values are captured, define any exclusions, find and replace values, construct breadcrumb style string for your region, and others.
   

   Link/Region Value Replacement: allows you to replace strings with any other that you would like. You can even use or regex to match/replace with a static value.

   Link/Region exclusions: allows you to specify the link that you want to exclude by entering a comma separated strings to search for in the link value. If a match is found, activity map will not track that interaction. A great use case is preventing PII data capture such as email addresses or phone numbers.

All of this without the need to employ custom code.

Once you are done with configuration, save the changes and always remember to build the library! This whole process to configuring Launch extension and validating new changes can be done easily within 5-10 min.

We are excited to launch this extension, in hopes that it will help Adobe Analytics users/clients to clean up some link texts and apply new logic for capturing region values across sites everywhere. Feel free to reach out with your feedback or questions on the extension. We are looking forward to hearing about how you use it!