SC Processing Rules Importance

1. Abhijith Ramalingaiah

2. Topics
 What's great with Processing Rules?
 Where it’s useful?
 Processing Rules and VISTA?
 Possible Data Manipulation?
 Things Processing Rules can’t Do?
 Tips
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3. What's great with Processing Rules?
It comes free in your Adobe Marketing Cloud product. And is ready to use without any
big changes to your overall approach to implementation.
• No code knowledge required
Can manipulate data collection without any coding knowledge
• No IT team dependency
Rules can be set up, enabled without a test cycle, completely independent of IT or QA
teams.
• Places where it's presence really matters
Third-party pages where you can’t change your code to put a Tag Management
snippet on.
• Processing rules are set at the report-suite level.
Can easily be copied from suite to suite, having specific suite mentioned.
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4. Where it’s useful?
• Realized that you have missed to capture a any query string, post s code roll out
• Passed in correct campaign query string in URL
• Wish to overwrite any variable value without re-writing s code
• Wish to alter data being captured at suite level
• Have no expertise for frequent edits to s code
• Have no time to pinch in IT team often, for any biz amends.
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5. Processing Rules and VISTA
Can one start comparing Processing Rules with VISTA?
YES - both work on hit-level, & can assign values to the “variables” that you sent in, and
both can add data into “variables” you did not send.
BUT, few major ways where VISTA is prominent -
• Processing Rules are defined in the UI by end users while VISTA Rules are written in
a dialect of C by the Engineering Services team. That means that VISTA Rules come
with a cost.
• Processing Rules can access ‘Context Data Variable's, VISTA Rules can not.
• VISTA Rules are more powerful. They can copy hits to other report suites and change
every aspect of a hit, even exclude it from processing.
• VISTA Rules have access to geo-location lookup as well as mobile meta data,
Processing Rules don’t.
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6. Possible Data Manipulation
Possible Things -
• Can have max of 30 rules
• Each rule can have up to 50 conditions
• Simple Pattern Matching
• Concatenate Values
• Detect Values from the URL and Query String
• Detect Values from any available Site Catalyst Variable including Context Data
• Passes latest value, in case of multiple condition
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7. Things Processing Rules can’t Do?
• Move or copy traffic to another report suite
• Exclusion of data based on IP address
• Set products or visitor ID
• Exploder ;Split delimited values
• Read hit type, cookies, or search keywords
• Access visitor data such as page number or any other variables values from prior
pages
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8. Tips
• Always test on a developmental report suite before pushing to production.
• To test whether a contains condition will match expected values, apply a search to
the Site Catalyst report
• Context data variables can act as temporary variables to pass data between rules
without using a variable.
• Setting Page Name with processing rules will break Click Map on that page
• Setting the value of an event to zero will unset it, unless it’s in the product list.
• Copy rules from one report suite to another and use the Report Suite ID attribute to
make rules report suite-specific.
• Always modified values would be passed to VISTA
• VISTA can still overwrite modified value pushed from Processing Rules, An eye on
VISTA would be better.
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