DTM to Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) Migration for a Large US E-retailer
Client Profile
The client – a Large US E-retailer is a market leader in providing voluntary benefit program for consumer products, vacations and online education services through an easy and convenient payment plan.
With automatic payments and 12-month payment terms they empower their customers to budget and avoid penalty fees or ballooning interest. Their service is a revolutionary e-commerce experience that gives customers access to a better life combined with a responsible way to buy.
Problem Background
The client is a large specialty e-retailer offering a voluntary benefit program in the United States. They have been using Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Management tool (DTM) to control their analytics implementation. However, it was announced in Fall 2018 that Adobe will be sunsetting the tool slowly over the next 3 years.
This means DTM will be kept up-to-date with security and bug fixes but there will no longer be feature development in the system. Adobe will be replacing DTM with their Adobe Experience Launch Platform which was released in November 2017.
This migration proves to be difficult for organizations who do not have a business domain around analytics and the engineering chops to complete the conversion themselves. In this case, we had been supporting the client with DTM and they asked us to assist them in migrating their analytics implementation to Adobe Launch.
The Solution
Softcrylic sat down with the client to establish migration goals, assess their system’s current state, architect and implement Adobe Launch, test, and finally deploy the updated system. Below is the outline with a very high overview of how we were able to set up our migration process with the client.
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Migration Strategy
These goals specify what the client needed us to accomplish in the Adobe DTM to Launch migration project.
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Readiness Assessment
The client has a truly enterprise class e-commerce platform with more than 200,000 visitors every day. A thorough implementation of Adobe Launch will deliver long-term productivity improvement and significant cost savings. Hence, a detailed analysis was done to assess the readiness for the Adobe Launch migration. The Tag Audit helped in deciding which existing DTM configurations needed to be transferred as they were to Launch and which ones to build from scratch. Also there is more than one approach available to migrate from DTM to Launch. Softcrylic explained the pros and cons of various migration approaches and decided on a hybrid approach to deliver most value for the client.
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Solution Architecture
The client’s MarTech ecosystem is made up of an advanced set-ups with a combination of leading marketing, advertising, and analytical tools. With so many 3rd party marketing tags to deploy, sequence, manage, test, and implement, this Adobe Launch migration project has become strategically important for their long-term marketing performance. Softcrylic worked with the client in redefining their MarTech solution architecture, exporting all existing rules from DTM, analyzing their purpose, validity and firing sequence etc. to decide upon creating new rules, conditions for rules, consolidating rules, rearchitecting rules that were obsolete, renaming schema of rules and moving from synchronous to asynchronous tag mode.
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Implementation
The actual implementation started with cleaning-up of the system based on the audit outcomes and setting up new properties, selecting the hosting method, mapping out the environments, updating onpage code, data layer enhancements, upgrading DTM tools to Launch extensions, migrating data elements, and the consolidation & re-architecting of rules. The implementation also took a first pass at testing and making necessary fixes. The documentation captured the migration process, dependencies and a governance process in a comprehensive manner.
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QA Testing
Softcrylic tested the Adobe Launch Implementation for all customer journey flows, online user behavior on events like navigation, search, compare, purchase. Tracking calls were viewed, recorded, and values were measured on both staging and production environments for various browsers and mobile devices. The reports were compared across staging and production to ensure there is a match. Specific suggestions were given to the client to run functional testing, regression testing, and performance testing using automated scripts.
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Deployment
The final steps we took were the actual deployment of Launch. We published all Launch properties, deployed on-page code changes, and monitored the production instances for smooth running. The reports were monitored continuously to ensure there are no anomalies. The client is successfully migrated to Adobe Launch.
Migration Approaches
Lift and Shift
Lesser Level of Effort
Tune Up
Medium Level of Effort
Overhaul
High level of effort
Clean Slate
Very high level of effort
Migrating to Adobe Launch?
Contact our Digital Analytics – Adobe Launch Tag Management team for a consultation.
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