Adobe DTM and Adobe Launch

Both tag management tools, Adobe DTM and Adobe Launch, enable an easy way of inserting JavaScript code on a website to manage analytics integrations. The main downside of DTM such as the lack of orders (and thus race conditions) might have been a reason for Adobe to develop the new tag management tool Launch. With Launch, you will reduce redundancy, be able to choose what should fire in which order, and you can set up an asynchronous implementation to improve your page speed. But most important, as you may already know: You do not really have a choice which tool to use in the future. By the end of 2021 DTM will not be supported anymore, so you need to migrate your DTM properties to Launch sooner or later. Read more: DTM Plans for a Sunset

As some may have worried about the migration process, we’ll show the most important things we learned from our migration process. You can choose between the following methods:

Rebuild your solution from the ground up

Set everything up the way you want, test in development and in staging. Finally, publish to production. At last you update your production website to reference the Adobe Launch Production Embed Code instead of the DTM code. This might need a lot of time & work, but you’ll get rid of any old DTM misconfiguration and have a nice review of – basically everything.

Use the DTM-to-Launch upgrade button

To get this option, you need access to both tag managers – Adobe DTM and Adobe Launch – via your Adobe Experience Cloud login. When you click the „upgrade to Launch“ button in DTM, a new Launch property is created and it won’t change anything in your DTM property during the migration. You can then review your configuration in Adobe Launch and decided to publish whenever you’re ready. The old DTM header and footer codes are still supported. You may need to do some fixes afterwards, because a few _satellite methods in DTM are no longer supported in Launch.

Be aware of:

  • You have to create a „fire beacon“ rule, because Adobe Analytics does not fire a beacon on page load anymore. Change the order to something higher than your other page load rules.
  • A few _satellite methods are no longer supported:
    • _satellite.notify (use _satellite.logger.info)
    • _satellite.cleanText
    • _satellite.setCookie (use _satellite.cookie.set)
    • _satellite.readCookie (use _satellite.cookie.get)
    • _satellite.getQueryParam/_satellite.getQueryParamCaseInsensitive
    • _satellite.URI
  • The debug mode only tells you what rules are firing, not what „satellite detected“
  • Launch does not support multiple Adobe instances nor can you have multiple Adobe Analytics extensions installed
  • A rule condition based on a Data element value is now named „Value comparison“
  • No „notes“ functionality
  • It is difficult to do a revision comparison and roll back to previous versions

The best of both worlds: “Upgrade” button, but cleaning up before and after

Before the migration, we recommend to run a test of the DTM property. ObservePoint offers audits and exporting the results in an Excel file. You can audit three properties simultaneously. When ObservePoint finished the audit, export an audit summary and see if all pages are checked. If that’s the case, go to DTM, click the „upgrade to Launch“ button, disable the DTM property and go to Launch. Change the no longer supported methods and make sure to double-check the things mentioned in the list above. Then publish the property in Adobe Launch and run the same audit again, export the audit summary and compare the pre-migration and the post-migration file. In the best case, there should be no change of your Adobe Analytics implementation at all. If you find major differences which you cannot fix quickly, you can still enable the old Adobe DTM property and publish it. Whatever was published last, DTM or Launch, will update the code on your production website.