Jonathan Roy
January 7, 2025
Leveraging the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Web SDK is a transformative solution for marketing leaders seeking to simplify and optimize their MarTech stack. By centralizing interactions with tools like Adobe Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager, the SDK reduces complexity and accelerates implementation timelines. It enables streamlined data governance, minimizes redundant processing, and improves tracking accuracy, all critical for effective decision-making.
With its support for advanced XDM schemas and real-time data collection, the AEP Web SDK not only simplifies multi-channel integration but also ensures your digital analytics infrastructure is agile and future-proof. This makes it an essential tool for teams aiming to enhance marketing performance and scale effortlessly.
The AEP Web SDK provides three key methods to send data to Adobe Analytics, each catering to different organizational needs. Selecting the right method is critical to ensuring efficiency, scalability, and actionable insights for decision-making.
Here the 3 methods:
Below, we present the pros and cons of each method, providing a clear overview of their strengths and limitations. Following this, we will focus on analyzing the two best options to help streamline and simplify your AEP Web SDK integration process.
In this approach, the Web SDK sends payloads as context data, which the Adobe Edge Network forwards to Adobe Analytics. Processing rules map these context data points to specific Analytics variables such as eVars, props, or events.
This approach uses a predefined XDM schema containing the Analytics Experience Event field group, which automates the mapping of XDM fields to Adobe Analytics variables.
Custom field mapping provides maximum flexibility by allowing organizations to design and control schema structures while mapping specific data points directly to Adobe Analytics variables.
The best method depends on your organization’s technical maturity, existing infrastructure, and specific goals:
If you need Martech simplicity and speed: The Analytics Processing Rules method is a marketer-friendly approach and works well for straightforward mappings
If you are AEP-centric and value standardization: The Experience Event Field Group method provides seamless integration with the Adobe ecosystem and ensures schema-driven governance.
If you require flexibility and advanced customization: The Custom Field Mapping method is ideal for handling complex use cases and highly specific data requirements.
For most modern implementations, combining Experience Event Field Group with Processing Rules provides a balance of standardization and ease of use. For highly customized needs or when dealing with non-standard data points, Custom Field Mapping is the way to go.
Standardization (Experience Event Field Group):
Flexibility (Processing Rules):
In some cases, you might also include Custom Field Mapping for advanced use cases:
Here’s an example of preference percentages tailored to the use of these tree methods in a typical implementation scenario, though these percentages could potentially vary based on the specific implementation:
When implementing Adobe Analytics with the AEP Web SDK, combining the Experience Event Field Group and Processing Rules offers a streamlined and efficient approach to data collection and processing. The Experience Event Field Group provides a standardized framework that ensures consistency and alignment with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) schemas, simplifying the data organization process and supporting strong data governance.
This method is typically rated highly in terms of ease of use and standardization. On the other hand, Processing Rules offer flexibility by allowing users to map collected data to Adobe Analytics variables (eVars, props, events) directly within the Adobe Analytics interface. This method is known for its user-friendly nature and flexibility, making it ideal for teams looking for dynamic configurations without the need to modify the data layer or Web SDK. Together, these tools strike a balance between standardization and flexibility, making MarTech implementations more efficient while minimizing the need for custom coding.
We want to implement Adobe Analytics to track page views and custom events using Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Web SDK. We'll use Experience Event Field Groups to collect structured data and Processing Rules in Adobe Analytics to map this data to specific eVars, props, and events.
First, you will define the event data structure using the Experience Event Field Group. This helps to ensure that the data is organized and consistent.
This example collects essential data like page name, URL, referrer, visitor ID, and custom attributes such as campaign and category. The event data is then pushed to the adobeDataLayer, which is a standard practice when working with AEP Web SDK.
// Initialize Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK
window.adobeDataLayer = window.adobeDataLayer || [];
// Define the Experience Event Field Group for a page view
const experienceEventFieldGroup = {
eventType: "pageView", // Event type to identify the type of data (in this case, page view)
pageName: document.title, // Capture the page title dynamically
pageURL: window.location.href, // Capture the current page URL
referrerURL: document.referrer, // Capture the referring URL for traffic source information
visitorID: window._satellite.getVisitorId(), // Fetch unique visitor ID
customAttributes: {
campaign: "summer_sale", // Custom campaign tracking
category: "electronics", // Product category being viewed
pageType: "landing" // Type of page (landing page, product page, etc.)
}
};
// Push the experience event data into the Adobe Data Layer
window.adobeDataLayer.push({
event: "experienceEvent",
fieldGroup: experienceEventFieldGroup
});
// Optionally, log the event data for debugging
console.log("Experience Event Data:", experienceEventFieldGroup);
Once the event data is available in the data layer, you will configure Processing Rules in the Adobe Analytics interface to map this data to relevant variables (eVars, props, and events). Processing Rules allow you to transform or assign data from the data layer to the Adobe Analytics reporting variables.
By implementing Experience Event Field Groups and Processing Rules, you improve your data governance by:
For Data Governance, you can emphasize the following aspects that help maintain the integrity, consistency, and security of the data when implementing Adobe Analytics with AEP Web SDK, Experience Event Field Groups, and Processing Rules:
By using the Experience Event Field Groups within Adobe Experience Platform, you ensure that the data collected is consistently structured. This helps standardize the data format across different projects, departments, and tools, reducing the risk of errors caused by inconsistent data collection methods.
Implementing strict data validation rules in Processing Rules ensures that only valid data is passed to Adobe Analytics. You can create rules that filter out invalid or missing data, preventing the ingestion of incomplete or incorrect information that could affect reporting accuracy.
Data governance often involves ensuring that data sources, transformations, and actions can be traced back for auditing purposes. Using Experience Event Field Groups and Processing Rules, the flow of data is clear and transparent. This makes it easy to trace how specific data points (such as pageName or campaign) are being processed and mapped to analytics variables.
Limiting access to sensitive data is an important aspect of data governance. By configuring Processing Rules and Adobe Analytics variable mappings, you can ensure that only authorized users have access to view or modify specific variables and tracking settings.
Data Integrity refers to ensuring that the data sent to Adobe Analytics is accurate, complete, and consistent across the entire data pipeline.
Experience Event Field Groups help ensure that the data is well-structured before it's sent to Adobe Analytics, and Processing Rules allow you to perform additional transformations and validations.
It's critical to ensure that any personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive user data is handled in accordance with data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
By using Processing Rules, you can implement checks and transformations to mask or anonymize sensitive data before it's passed into Adobe Analytics, helping to ensure compliance with privacy laws.
For ongoing governance, you should implement version control for any changes made to the Processing Rules or Experience Event Field Groups.
Proper documentation and tracking of changes allow teams to easily manage updates, track modifications, and maintain a history of the data structure changes.
Data governance also involves preparing for exceptions and errors in data collection. By setting up error handling mechanisms within Processing Rules (e.g., using fallback values or conditional checks), you can avoid tracking incomplete or erroneous data and ensure that the data being sent to Adobe Analytics remains clean and actionable.
Integrating Adobe Analytics with the AEP Web SDK presents various challenges, but by anticipating potential roadblocks and applying the right strategies, teams can overcome them efficiently.
For example, tackling data layer complexity through standardized schemas ensures consistency across platforms, while leveraging Processing Rules simplifies data mapping.
Real-time data processing can be streamlined with validation strategies to avoid delays, and using the Experience Event Field Group improves compatibility across tools in the Adobe ecosystem. Effective communication and collaboration within teams, coupled with thorough documentation, foster a smooth integration process.
Furthermore, ensuring data privacy and compliance through anonymization and regular audits protects sensitive information and ensures adherence to regulations. By addressing these common challenges with practical solutions, teams can build a robust and scalable analytics infrastructure that drives actionable MarTech insights and supports ongoing improvements.
In conclusion, integrating Adobe Analytics with the AEP Web SDK using Experience Event Field Groups and Processing Rules simplifies MarTech integration, streamlining data collection and tracking configurations. This approach ensures data consistency and flexibility, allowing businesses to easily adapt to changing needs without complex coding. It also upholds strong data governance, maintaining accuracy, security, and compliance. By leveraging these tools, organizations reduce custom coding, accelerate time-to-value, and build scalable analytics setups that deliver actionable insights, unlocking the full potential of Adobe’s ecosystem.
