Seperate rule for beacon

[AEPAA]

I have been seeing that in some launch properties, they have been using seperate rules for only firing beacon where it is set order 90.

Here is the case,

There are two rules namely

1.)All pages|Global load|Set - It has, Library top event and in action Set variable AA extension .Order 50

2)All pages|Global load|Fire - It has same as above in event and in actio only Set Beacon . Order 90

Can someone tell why people create 2 rules seperately , Can someone tell what could be the reason and Alsi, is this the Best practice?

[abhinavbalooni]

Hi @AEPAA 

I have personally not seen such practice where send beacon is in a separate rule but it might just be me.

Usual practice is to have send beacon as part of the same rule.

Coming to your situation, in the set variables action in the first rule, do you have something executing in the custom code block ? If there is a custom code in there, the reason for having a send beacon with a much higher order would be to allow time for the custom code to execute and map values in the analytics call which might not be getting achieved by having send beacon in the same rule.

Another thing you can do is, enable debug mode and have a look at the rules firing on the page along with these two. Is there any other rule which might be setting some other values in AA variables and then order 90 rule triggers the final payload.

Those are my two cents on it.

Cheers,

Abhinav

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

I have heard of doing this practice for running some specific logic...

Let's say you have a generic Page View rule (that is one rule to set all your generic page view dimensions).

Now, let's say you have some logic that you only want to set some specific dimensions on say a "Search" page, you could create a rule to set the dimensions for Search Pages.

Then maybe you want to have other logic for Product Pages, you could have a rule to set that...

Then again, there is one generic rule to run after all of those to send the beacon...

While this could work, it's not the most efficient, and could result in "dimension" rules being missed... Even with the order being set, this is based on the start of the rule, it doesn't necessarily wait for the whole rule to finish before starting the next rule (particularly is there is there is any sort of slow logic happening).

Now, as long as everything is tested and working, in theory this shouldn't be a problem, but as more an more rules get added, or more complex logic comes into play it could start to manifest in issues.

In most cases, as @abhinavbalooni mentioned, most implementations send the beacon in the same rule.... 

I prefer to build my "page specific" logic into the Data Elements or into the Custom Code block of the rule.. But non-coders would find that approach potentially harder....