Why the Adobe Client Data Layer (ACDL) is the right data layer for your website
In today’s connected world, for businesses it is more important than ever to have a digital presence. From mom-and-pop operations to fortune 500s, across industries, it is vital that you have accurate and comprehensive digital analytics to measure the performance your digital presence. Afterall, as a business, how would you know how your website is performing if you do not measure that performance? Furthermore, how would you improve / optimize that performance if you do not know what and who are driving your conversations?
Within Digital Analytics, there is a barrage of analytics tools to choose from, but two main players dominate the industry: Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. Regardless of the tools you use, a well-structured data layer is essential to ensuring accurate and actionable analytics. In this article we will explore the latest data layer from Adobe, the Adobe Client Data Layer (ACDL) and compare and contrast it to the legacy World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) data layer.
To begin, a data layer is a JavaScript object that is used to pass information from your website. This information can contain details about the webpage or about the visitors. These details can then be leveraged by developers and/or a Tag Manager to populate variables and activate triggers/load rules for tags.
The ACDL is a JavaScript object that stores data and events happening on a page within the scope of a request. More simply put, ACDL is an event-driven data layer. This is opposed to the legacy W3C data layer which is a customer experience digital data layer (CEDDL).
Compared to the legacy W3C data layer, the Adobe Client Data Layer:
- Improves Data Accuracy
- Flattens the Learning Curve
- Reduces Discovery, Development & QA Lead Times
Let us explore each of those topics in more detail:
Improves Data Accuracy
The Adobe Client Data Layer loads asynchronously. This means data is sent as soon as it is available and is not depending on other items/libraries to load before the data is available in the data layer. Should other items fail to load, or take a long time to load, with ACDL the data would still be sent to the Tag Manger. This asynchronous load makes the Adobe Client Data Layer resilient to timing issues that historically could have been problematic with the W3C data layer.
In short, the Adobe Client Data Layer ensures more comprehensive and accurate analytics tracking as race conditions created by time issues are essentially eliminated. Businesses can confidently make data driven decisions safe in the knowledge that they have all the best data available to track users and the user’s experience on their website.
Flattens the Learning Curve
The ACDL was designed for ease of use for developers. Unlike the W3C data layer where there are different code standards for tracking page loads vs events, the Adobe Client Data Layer treats everything as an event. This standardizes the analytics implementation and provides one consistent framework for developers to learn. In addition, the Adobe Client Data Layer is supported by an Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) Extension. This extension provides step by step instructions for configuring Tags and reduces the need to create complicated custom code to extract data. Furthermore, the ACDL is structured similarly to Google’s data layer. For developers that are new to Adobe Analytics, but familiar with Google Analytics, there are only a few nuanced differences.
For a more developer-focused technical analysis of the ACDL please refer to Ray Piccolotti’s Article.
Reduces Discovery, Development & QA Lead Times
As noted above, the Adobe Client Data Layer has a standard framework for tracking all events on a website.
With an event-driven data layer, in the discovery/requirements gathering phase, business owners are able to more directly see how business requirements are solutioned into technical requirements. This transparency reduces the need for multiple clarification meetings and enables teams to identify and resolve any misalignments between business requirements and technical execution faster, reducing unnecessary redevelopment.
In addition, development times are also reduced as developers have a consistent data structure to follow. Should new website pages and / or website events be introduced, developers should have a roadmap to configure the data layer to account for these events, without minimal guidance from an Analytics Solution Design Architect.
Furthermore, this consistent data structures also reduces quality assurance (QA) lead times. The QA team has a consistent method for accessing the data layer reducing the mental load in switching between validating page loads vs events. Additional development time, to write direct call payload information to the console, would not be needed as all data would be available in the dataLayer.
Real World Data Layer Comparison
Having recently worked with development teams to implement both the W3C dataLayer and the ACDL, I can personally attest to the benefits of ACDL over the W3C dataLayer. Comparing the ACDL implementation to the W3C implementation with two comparability skilled and experience development teams, onboarding with ACDL was faster/simpler and resulted in more accurate/reliable data.
The ACDL development team had one consistent data framework to apply compared to the W3C team that struggled to determine which data would be sent to the data layer vs through a direction call. Furthermore, in validating the data layer implementation, the ACDL team did not need to do any additional work to write data to the console. The WC3 team, in contrast, stumbled to consistently write data to both the data layer and the console, resulting in several rounds of back and forth.
Additionally, the W3C data layer exhibited intermittent timing issues. While W3C data was written to the data layer, at times the data was appended after the event/analytics beacon had already fired resulting in missing or incomplete data. With the ACDL implementation, on the other hand, data consistently rendered as expected in the analytics beacon.
To summarize, while the W3C data layer was the accepted standard when it was first introduced, in the humble opinion of this Analytics Consultant, by today’s standard, the Adobe Client Data Layer is clearly the superior data layer, and the data layer I would strongly recommend for all my clients.
