What’s in my Digital Toolbox?

MarTech professionals in today’s world are presented with an endless array of online resources for improving their efficiencies. To-do lists, code formatters, helpful FAQs and general tips and tricks can all be found within a few clicks of the mouse. Determining which tools are most beneficial to you will take some experimentation and is largely based on personal preferences. Below is a quick peek into my own personal digital toolbox, with some notes about each resource. I hope you find it useful!

Omnibug

As many of you are likely familiar, Omnibug is a popular browser extension used for “debugging” and decoding outgoing digital marketing requests. Simply install the extension and you’ll be ready to parse through analytics page view and event tags that fire as you navigate your site. It’s quick to install, easy to load in the developer tools panel, and super helpful in answering almost any question related to your onsite tagging.

Beacon Parser by Jennifer Kunz

If you’ve ever opened up the dev tools on a page and, for whatever reason, your marketing tags aren’t nice and tidy when drilling into the Headers tab, this bookmark is for you! Just copy and paste the entire request payload into this nifty tool and hit the “Parse my Beacon” button. Boom! An orderly table of all analytics events and their respective values listed out. You can even download the table into Excel if you’d like.

HTML Reference

If you’re like me and you aren’t super technical, then this bookmark will quickly become your BFF. The HTML Element Reference glossary, and really the entire w3Schools site, is a great one-stop-shop resource for all things code-related. The alphabetical element glossary is a super helpful tool when modifying different components within a page and needing a quick HTML tag description or example. This is especially helpful when manipulating custom code within an Adobe Target activity.

Illuminate

“Access all of your customer insights and A/B test learnings in one place. Organize these insights by device, segment, channel, or any other relevant filters.” That quote succinctly conveys the beauty that is Illuminate, an A/B test management tool by Brooks Bell. Goodbye Excel and Google Docs – Hello one-click test importing via the awesome Adobe Target integration. And don’t forget about the ability to create custom tags for each test to quickly filter through your test library. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

Adobe Target Sample Size Calculator

Ok, so this isn’t as sexy as some of the other tools on the list, but it’s just as helpful to have bookmarked. You may already be familiar with this handy tool, as it enables marketers to quickly punch in a few key numbers, and – voila! – answers to some of the most common testing questions.

“How long will I need to run this test?”

“How many visitors do I need per day to reach significance?”

“At what confidence level can we call a winner after a week?”

Sure, you can probably calculate these manually with some fancy formulas, but you’ll save yourself a lot of time by just bookmarking this instead.

HTML Formatter

As mentioned in the “HTML Reference” section above, I won’t be mistaken for a front-end developer any time soon, but that doesn’t mean as a marketer I can ignore the best practices of HTML. It is of utmost importance to ensure your custom code and A/B test modifications are made flawlessly to ensure no inadvertent breakages occur within your digital experiences. This free formatter, aptly named FreeFormatter.com, is a no-frills resource for checking code before you push it to production. You can either paste directly into the formatter or upload a document for review.

DiffChecker

This one doesn’t need much introduction. DiffChecker is a super useful tool to compare two blocks of text (or code) side by side and quickly identify the differences. This is a great resource for troubleshooting efforts, validating code modifications or simply ensuring you didn’t inadvertently “fat-finger” something.

Digital Analytics Insight by Rohan Kapoor

An incredible resource for all things Adobe, Kapoor’s blog is a running journal of useful information. With a quick keyword search – or by clicking on the popular topics on the right rail- you’ll discover endless documentation pertaining to any Adobe Experience Cloud use case or architectural obstacle you may encounter. From A/B testing strategy to solution implementation best practices, Digital Analytics Insight is a great resource for any digital marketer.

The Digital Marketing Architect by Pedro Monjo

Just about everything I mentioned for DAI above can be reiterated for PedroMonjo.com. Updated regularly by an Adobe MSA, this is a great resource for searching a variety of solution-based topics. Posts span from strategic to technical, and the author – Monjo – is also very responsive to comments and interactive with his readers. Spend some time on the DMA site and I’ll bet you end up clicking the star icon in your address bar before long.

Switchboard by Softcrylic

I’m a company man, so I certainly won’t leave out this incredible plug-in recently released by the Softcrylic team. This tag management Chrome extension allows you to easily switch environments, detect implementation issues, replace any part of a network request URL with a custom string, and much more.

There you have it, folks – a collection of tools that I find super useful on the job and hope you will as well.

When it comes to bookmarks and online resources, I don’t think you can ever have too many valuable tools in your back pocket.

As the great Lil Wayne once said, “you can call me Eddy ’cause I stay ready.”