Is there a performance hit against the number of data elements in a single rule?

[Motoed-Work]

Quick back story, our site is largely "members only". So the majority of our content is traffic from known people and we track their demographic info.

We have a rule in our configuration sending data to Adobe Analytics. We set a lot of evars on "every page load" that includes things like page name, account name, userID, zone and group information. We also have added things in this "every page load" rule for things like "on the search results page" add the keyword searched to an evar. We had a suggestion from a team member to remove that keyword search from the every page load an only load it on the search page, but we would also be duplicating all the other evars in that new search only rule so we don't lose the other evars we are tracking on the "every page" which would become every page except a few..." 

I've heard that too many rules triggering on a page impacts performance, but does the number of evars in a single rule also impact performance? 

If there is a rule that triggers and has a lot of data elements in it, but those elements are empty because the condition for the site to populate those, does that cause a performance drain to consider adjusting?


As we unravel this thread, it becomes even deeper because we have pages available to logged in customers and prospective customers not logged in. So I'm wondering should we set all of those evars on the "every page load" in the Adobe Analytics Extension under global variables and then change our "every page load" rule to "if logged in" or "if not logged in" rules to get the demographic info or "if search page do this" and just add in 

I look forward to your insight.

[Jennifer_Kunz · Accepted solution]

There could be, if you go to an extreme. But it also depends on your data elements- are they custom code? Are they scraping stuff out of the HTML of the page? 
That said, if the option is between 20 data elements set in a single rule, or 10 data elements set in 2 rules... the 10 data elements in 2 rules will have a slightly (still likely imperceptible) higher impact, because it has the weight of the logic for the extra rule in addition to the 20 (total) data elements.  BUT, if splitting them up means you can have all 20 DEs fire in one situation, but only 10 in another specific situation, it can be worth it. I would recommend reducing duplicative logic (eg, if you can set eVar10 in only one spot, that's ideal, both for page performance but mostly for scaleability/ease of maintenance. I HIGHLY recommend not setting your global variables in multiple places.) https://www.digitaldatatactics.com/index.php/2024/02/09/the-adobe-launch-rule-sandwich/ walks through the approach that has worked best for me but to be honest, unless we're discussing hundreds of data elements and/or hundreds of rules, or a whole lot of custom code, the effect on page performance will be so incredibly small. I'd focus on what's going to be easiest to maintain (which down the road often means something that is also page performant).

For what it's worth, marketing tags tend to do a lot more damage to page performance than your analytics actions/data elements. 

[Rudi-Shumpert]

^^^ This.