Contests

Company Name: Torstar

Company URL: https://www.thestar.com

Your Name: Jennifer Dungan

Your Title: Optimization Manager Analytics

Describe your company, the customer experience and business challenge(s) you set out to solve with Adobe Experience Cloud products, and how long your company/organization has been using Adobe Experience Cloud products.

Torstar is one of Canada's largest media companies, focusing mostly on news publishing and many different vertical products. We have been an Adobe Analytics client since before 2007 when I joined the company.

With the paywall/subscription model in place on our content, we experienced a challenge when trying to track our AMP implementation. The two "out of the box" solutions didn't fit our needs - the older solution resulted in inflated UVs and Vs, and the newer solution didn't allow for tracking changes in the entitlement state when users logged in.

Our States are:

• Non-Logged in users (who are metered and could be trying to read premium content behind a hard paywall)
• Logged In users without a subscription (subject to the same meter/hardlocked content, but we know who they are and can track their user guid)
• Logged In users who are subscribers and should not ever hit a paywall

During the course of reading content, users could hit multiple states, and tracking if a page was viewed with or without a paywall is important to understanding how much content is being consumed vs how many users are trying to access content and are potential future subscribers.

Describe how you have integrated and used multiple Adobe Experience Cloud products to solve these challenges to improve and personalize the customer experience/journey. Please provide information that will be helpful in understanding your integration (e.g. architecture diagram, step by step process integration flow, etc.).

To tackle this challenged we dug deep into a custom server-side tracking mechanism that is triggered based on AMP Authentication status triggers. When an AMP page is opened, authentication is checked for both if the user is logged in, and if so, if they are a subscriber. If we know the user, we get their user guid from our system and send that, along with the article to our server. All the relevant page dimensions and events are built, including user information; then we call the Adobe Cloud ID service to get an MID value for the user; then the information is sent to Adobe server-side.

In order to ensure that our tracking calls are correct during testing, the service sends a pingback to the AMP page with a copy of the request that we can review for correct tracking information.

If the user is hit with a paywall (the wall status is part of the page view data, showing that the user has been blocked), there is a link that will allow the user to purchase a subscription, or to log in with a proper subscriber account. The Sign In link opens a new tab to our website login page, the user can log in (and they are properly returned back to AMP), where the authentication code is checked again. If the user is a subscriber, this information allows the wall to be dropped, and the page is tracked again, this time showing that the page view is now without a wall. (Login flow is collected as part of the website tracking in the tab where Javascript is able to run and do normal analytics tracking).

Based on your successful use and integration of multiple Adobe Experience Cloud products, describe how it has transformed the customer experience/journey, and the value, business impact, and results your company/organization has realized. Please cite both qualitative and quantitative results as applicable.

Our solution allows us to trigger the different stats on the AMP articles, while at the same time we are able to collect full information about the content without needing to use Javascript to process the data, which is unavailable on AMP. Using our server to do the heavy lifting and processing allows us more detailed controlled over the data, and the pingback still allows us to test the content fully and ensure the data is correct; allowing us full visibility and allowing the AMP content to rollup into our global suite with all dimensions available.