Announcement: Discontinuation of Adobe-developed Google extensions

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The Background

In the old days of Adobe tag management, DTM provided a Google Analytics tool to help with the deployment of Google Analytics tags.

With the initial development of (at the time) Launch, by Adobe, the Launch team built an extension for Google Universal Analytics to maintain feature parity for Google tags and to provide a known upgrade path for DTM customers.

We eventually developed a Google gtag extension and a Google Ads extension to aid in deploying those technologies as well.  We had good intentions with the release of these extensions, but it was hard to prioritize any product work on these extensions when we had so much that we wanted to do with our own technologies. We didn’t even get around to updating the Google Analytics extension to use our own Gtag extension. 

The availability of Google Analytics 4 forced a reckoning where we needed to make some long-term decisions about the future of these extensions.

The Google Global Site Tag extension

In the interim, Acronym developed an excellent extension called Google Global Site Tag which won an award at the Adobe Summit in 2018.  This extension supports everything that our own suite of Google extensions was intended to and did a better job of it.

In addition, their extension has full support for modern deployments of Google tags including utilization of gtag.js as well as support for Google Analytics 4.

Full documentation for Acronym’s extension is available at: https://docs.acronym.com/analytics/adobe-launch/gtag.

We are pleased to have a partner like Acronym to support the needs of our users who utilize Google technologies.

Discontinuing the Adobe-developed Google extensions

Effective immediately, the Launch team is discontinuing our own Google extensions and recommend that customers begin utilizing the Google Global Site Tag extension for their Google tagging needs.

A discontinued extension has a few important differences from other extensions:

• A discontinued extension can continue to be used with no impact on any properties that already have it installed
• A discontinued extension is not available for installation from the extension catalog
• A discontinued extension cannot be installed on a property

If you have already installed an Adobe-developed Google extension on your property, it’ll continue to work exactly as it does now.  You can still update the configuration and use its rule components in new or existing rules.  You can continue to add it to libraries and build them.

However, for properties where the extension is not installed, it will essentially disappear.  You won’t be able to search for it in the catalog, and you won’t be able to install it directly through the API.

This has a few downstream impacts as well, for example, performing a property copy will not produce a full copy because the discontinued extension will not be allowed to be installed on the target property.

Voluntary Migration

For those properties already utilizing the Adobe-owned Google extensions, you can continue to do so for as long as you want.  There will be no forced migration, ever.  Moving over to use the Google Global Site Tag extension is entirely voluntary and should be driven by your own use cases.

If you would like the source code for any of the Adobe-developed Google extensions for any reason, please make a request through Customer Care.

For those who are interested in moving to use the Google Global Site Tag extension, migration guides are available from Acronym here: https://docs.acronym.com/analytics/adobe-launch/gtag/migration-guides.

Wrapping Up

We are confident that Acronym’s extension will meet the needs of our Google users better than our own extensions were able. This will lead to better outcomes for users that get a fully functional Google extension. It will also reduce the maintenance burden on the product development team and free them up to focus on some exciting things in the pipeline.

Happy tagging!