Is this way to integrate Adobe Analytics doable?

[Kentzhou74]

We're one SAAS provider, and we're considering to integrate Adobe Analytics to our SAAS product. However, after reading material re AA, I've some questions there.

Basically, AA provides one capability to allow customers to configure everything in its Experience Platform, then generate one JS lib, so that customers' application can embed such JS lib to perform collect data to send back to Adobe side. Seeming this is recommended approach. All stuffs controlled by customer.

However, our SAAS product is integrating Google Analytics, we just load one standard libs, then to use it to collect data inside our code, at this approach, everything is controlled by us, we declare customer account, event collecting, etc... So my question is, does AA also support such integration approach?

Thanks,

Kent

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Technically yes, you can set all the values in your site, and just use Adobe Launch to extract the values and populate the props, eVars, etc based on those values....

The trickiest part however is setting the suite... Adobe Launch is set up in such a way that you must configure your tracking suite in the extension, and also you can set dev and staging variants in addition to production.

You can override this value by using JS to override the account in your rule using  s_account="xxx"

[Kentzhou74]

@Jennifer_Dungan Thanks for your reply. My plan is:

Customers can engage with Adobe to apply Adobe Analytics account (also pay for it)

In my product, customers must configure their AA account that they applied from Adobe, then we can pickup such configured information then initialize AA global envirable, like you mentioned,

s_account="xxx"

so that AA standard library that our product loaded can work correctly.

Is this doable?

Thanks,

Kent

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Are you trying to run ALL Clients through one Adobe Launch property? Or would you configure their properties the same way in their organization?

The first comes with a lot more challenges that I didn't consider... the fact that the Adobe Launch account has to be in the same organization as the tracking suite, and the Visitor ID service has to be tied to the organization id, etc.

I was thinking that you would maybe have Client A, and they would have multiple websites that you would configure with the same tracking from one Launch property.

However, if you plan on running all clients through one property, I don't think that will work...

If you are are going to keep clients separate, that might work, but this isn't something I have personally tried.. so I can't guarantee it.

Right now, you can test a simple scenario of reading your site's data layer and sending to a test suite. Then build on a little logic piece by piece..... 

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

Using Adobe Launch probably isn't the correct approach here. This is a SaaS product, like Shopify. I wouldn't expect Shopify to embed a single Adobe Launch property that all of its customers must use (if it supports AA tracking at all).

@Kentzhou74 one thing you should consider is that AA is designed to be almost-100% configurable by the customer to suit the latter's business reporting needs. I would expect Customer A to have different reporting requirements from Customer B. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach might not work here.

I would suggest that you allow customers to embed their own Adobe Launch snippet in your product. They can then take control of their own tracking and reporting. Your product could probably provide some simple integrations, e.g. expose the page names, clicked link names, URLs, etc. Perhaps you could even support a basic Adobe Client Data Layer that your customers can consume and build upon for their needs.

If allowing customers to embed a Launch snippet isn't feasible (because who knows what other JS code they might run in there!), then your approach sounds ok, but your customers might feel handicapped because they would just be able to get basic page view and link click data, which is not going to be very useful to them.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I definitely agree with this.. I was trying to avoid saying this... and to be fair, I see the same issue with Google Analytics or any analytics tool. Yes, you can pass the bare minimum of data (collect PVs, UVs, Visits, basic things like URL and page identifiers, etc)... but you really aren't using the tool to it's full potential.

Even GA, in the old UA world you would want to leverage your custom dimensions and events to be site specific... same with GA4, configuring your parameters and events to suit the individual needs leads to richer analytics.

If the vendor is dealing with clients that just want basic information, this could work - if they can get over the hurdles of the organization separation, etc....

But I do think that giving clients more control over their analytics is better.

[Kentzhou74]

@Jennifer_Dungan 

Agree. To enjoy AA full capability, we'll allow our customers configure everything on AA side, then generate one JS lib, our product will load this lib to collect data, which is recommended by Adobe, I guess.

Thanks,

Kent

[Kentzhou74]

@yuhuisg Yes.

We're SAAS provider, depending on different customers/tenants, if customer configured everything on AA, they will control analytics report, our product will load such JS generated by Adobe.

But if customer wants to use one Out-Of-Box analytics report, then our product will consider how to provide them this report based on customer Adobe account. For this scenario, we must load one standard Adobe JS lib.

That's my scenario.

Thanks,

Kent

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I still am concerned about the cross organization configuration...

What you could do is provide a guideline for users (these extensions with these settings, these data elements, these rules with these triggers) and instructions on how to configure their suite - then build a data layer into the site that this implementation is designed to use. For these users maybe you have a support person there to help them with the setup or someone they can call if they have questions.

This way your clients can start with their own instance, with some "pre-designed" tagging guidelines, but they still own the instance and can build on top of it, or do their own thing.

This means you don't have to worry about some of the complications, and the client retains full control.

All you need to do is ask them for the JS snippet to configure into their site.

[Kentzhou74]

@Jennifer_Dungan AA is pretty powerful, meanwhile, it's also complicated by contrast with Google Analytics. Everything configured by Customers in AA side will be compiled into final JS snippet. This will depend on Customers expertise on AA domain.

From perspective of our SaaS product, we just need to load different JS snippet dynamically for different Customers when customers try to access our product, codeless somewhat there.

[yuhuisg]

I suspect that if your customers are using AA, then they're not going to want a one-size-fits-all "Out of the box" analytics, because organisations that sign up for AA tend to want to customise it to their needs.

Having said all that, if you still want to proceed with this approach, then yes, you can include just the AppMeasurement.js in your SaaS product, and provide your customers with just the basic reports that AA provides, without any eVars/props/events/Marketing Channels. It'll be interesting to see how your customers use this.

[Kentzhou74]

@yuhuisg Such "Out of the box" analytics is liking "Basic Version" with less capability and "Advanced Version" is that Customers have full control AA then generate rich report.