DTM best practices

[marion33678522]

Hello Adobe Community,

I've been working with Adobe Analytics for some time now, but I've never been able to find a DTM process for implementing new tags easily.

I an All page load rule (for counting page views on any pages).

This rules take all the basic data elements defined on the data layer that should always be found (page name, button name, timestamp, etc..).

The problem arises when there are "special" pages with more data that we would lik eto collect (for instance the Logging Page )

These pages need new rules that will also trigger a new hit. In order to avoid that, I add conditions on my all page rule that stops this one of being fired so we don't have 2 hits. But sometimes this is really tedious since there can be many custom conditions to be added based on the navigation and hierarchy - and also , this is difficult to manage.

So my question is, is this the usual approach to tagging with DTM ?

I ve been thinking to add all the evars and props we track (even though not all the pages have the data layer that gives a value to the data element ) to the all page and all actions rule, but that would show many "undefined" values on Analytics right ?

Could someone please share his or hers best practices regarding tag management ?

Cheers !

[friendlymahi · Accepted solution]

Hi Marion

I am pretty much on the same boat. Speaking of Adobe Analytics integration in particular, the prime benefit of using DTM comes when we create a bunch of rules that send different data. At the tool level, we can setup few variables, and few on rule level. To my knowledge, the fields which don't receive data from the calls to data elements, will not be submitted in the image request unless you assign a default value. You may try this and share your feedback.

For the use case of our discussion, here is what I will do if I have a need for logging error messages on the page, which may not always show up but do showup only on certain pages and certain page loads (after form submission perhaps). So, instead of page load rule firing the pageView event. I shall use pageload rule to determine if the page has errors or a normal page. For normal pages, I shall setup a direct rule, and another for including errors as well. So to sum up, Tool will have default vars which are included on all pageviews, dcr for normal page views will include things that are specific to default use case, and the other dcr will fire for pageviews that include error messages. Well, I cant say this is the best as I am very naive on this subject and learning.

If you find a better approach, please share. You may use the link below for some basics on these approaches.

http://myomniture.co.nf/?cat=8

Thank you !

[marion33678522]

Hello friendlymahi​ !

Thaks for your input and your link ! They have many good tips and doc.

I did'nt realized that a good and simple TMS (tag management system) implementation is very hard to obtain ! Since each web site is diferent, every DTM has a very different config also..

Does anybody have any more best practices ?

Cheers !