Disadvantages of Using the Global Site Tag Extension for Sending Data to GA4

[Santosh_Sharma]

I’m working on a project where Adobe Launch will primarily be used to manage analytics tracking. We’re considering using the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) extension to send tracking data to GA4 directly from Launch. However, the broader existing tracking ecosystem for the client’s web properties relies on GTM and GA4.

Additionally, we are exploring an option (custom JS script) of capturing event changes or pushes in the Adobe data layer and automatically pushing the same to the Google data layer to trigger a GTM tag.

Are there any notable disadvantages, drawbacks, or challenges, or will there be any issues when sending tracking data to GA4 via Adobe Launch using the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) extension?

[Santosh_Sharma]

Also, the data from launch to GA4 will be collected in the same property where GA4 comes from GTM on other websites.

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @Santosh_Sharma 

well, let's put it that way, every vendor is good with their own tags (also political).

Hence, you will never find an official GA4 extension in Launch, the same way you won't find an official Adobe Analytics tag in GTM.

Yes, it is just javascript, and you can surely trigger GA4 through Launch, but this will likely end up in a very custom implementation that is error prone and would be a lot easier to implement through the Google tool.

My suggestions in this case are

• keep the vendor stacks separate, even if this means a second tag manager. These days, they are lightweight enough to run asynchronously side by side
• ask your stakeholders which direction this is heading. Are you just testing analytics tool A and B side by side but will eventually remove one again

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

I have a number of sites where I use Adobe Launch and GTM in parallel, I also have a number of sites where I use only Adobe Launch and do the GA through Launch.

I do not, nor would I ever to the opposite where I use GTM to control Adobe Analytics. Is it possible.. sure (with a lot of custom code), but it's pretty brutal...

While @bjoern__koth is correct in saying there is no official GA extension in Adobe Launch, the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) extension works quite well.

NOTE: I did recently discover a bug with how it was setting cookies.... it was setting them to session by default, and despite the plugin saying "Cookie Expires (# of days)" with the description being "The number of days until the Google Analytics cookie should expire. Defaults to 730 (2 years)."

It's not in Days... It's in Seconds, so please manually set that value to something like 63070000.

Even without using this plugin, GA is generally fairly simplistic, so using custom for your GA implementation is also fairly easy.

Honestly, GTM is not as flexible a tag manager, for really customized needs, it's not as easy to use.. and if you have a lot of different triggers, trying to maintain two sets of logic can be a lot of overhead, and extra code bloat...   I don't find GTM to be that "lightweight" to be honest...  it constantly shows up as worst offender in a lot of our performance tests (granted, we also end up with multiple GTM instances on our site cause a lot of our advertiser add their own GTM container via their ad creative... that doesn't help)

If you are really concerned about separation of concerns (making sure that GA and Adobe are isolated), use both tag managers. If not, and you want a more concise and consolidated way to manage your tracking, then you can use Launch for both.

Just make sure you are fully testing your implementations and getting the results that you expect.