Marketing automation, machine learning models, customer data platforms; at least one of these is included in your company’s ambitions for 2020. But is you analytics implementation prepared for it? Many companies struggle to implement ambitious data projects because of a lack of data standards and ownership, specialy in the digital analytics sphere.
We introduce the GDDL, a digital data layer framework developed by Stitchd but available as open source solution for everyone that is looking for a sustainable approach to a data layer implementation.
Presentation held at Superweek conference, Hungary, January 2020.
11. IT and Marketing lost in translation
IT/DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Owns the code and strives for standardization and
reliability. Follows procedures to maintain stability.
MARKETING/ANALYTICS TEAM
Manages advertising efforts and needs flexibility to apply
optimizations and additional tools quickly.
13. New project: migrate s-code towards a TMS
• Analysts did not trust the data
• Legacy implementation
• Everyone involved left the organisation
• Business asked for a cross-brand view
• Much ETL work involved
• IT was investigating a new CMS
• Angular front-end
• Parent company was talking to Google
• Switch from Adobe to 360 in the near future?
3 years ago
14. Key attributes put forward by Jim Gordon:
• Flexible
• Accept data in any format
• Semantic
• Intiuitive naming conventions
• Efficient
• Minimal amount of code
• Consistent
• Minimal design patterns to implement.
• Resilient
• Vendor agnostic and comply to browser standards
A quest for the perfect data layer
15. The Generic Digital Data Layer,
an event-driven, asynchronous
data layer.
Introducing: GDDL
18. • Impressions
• Take screen view into
consideration!
• Clicks
• Submit
• Errors
• Focus / Complete
• Product specific
• Add to cart, detail impression,
checkout, purchase
• Video specific
• Play, Pause, Complete, % viewed
Relevant events
Think of events on an abstract level.
19. Map those events to the different components within your CMS.
• Page
• Impression
• Button
• Impression
• Click
• Contentblock
• Impression
• Sitesearch
• Impression
• Click
• …
CMS components
20. List per component-event all variables that are required for analysis.
Provide context
• Button-impression
• Name
• Placement
• Button-click
• Name
• Placement
• Form-impression
• Name
• Step
• Stepname
• Form-submit
• Name
• Step
• Stepname
• ResultYour tagging plan
21. The implementation is kept as simple as
possible, relying on web standards that are
supported in every browser and programming
languages that are understood by any front-
end developer.
• Vanilla JavaScript & HTML data attributes
• Event + info
How does this translate into code?
data-tracking-event=‘button-impression’
data-tracking-info=‘{
“placement”:“top”,
”name”:”subscribe now”}’
22. The queue of generic events is translated into the data layer format
expected by the TMS in use.
Generating the data layer
Web Pages Event
handler(s)• Event-tag
• Info-tag
Event
translator
TMS SPECIFIC ANALYTICS
SPECIFIC
PLATFORM
SPECIFIC
1 2 3 4
23. By using an event-driven framework, we overcome
the problems with traditional page-based tracking and content visibility.
How does this solve our challenges?
24. By applying standards and unification we steer away from person &
vendor dependent implementations.
How does this solve our challenges?
25. • Tool independent
• Prevent vendor lock-in
• Reduced implementation & maintenance costs
• No specific briefings required
• Data quality assurance and trust
• Enables automated testing
• Implementation tailored to the business needs
• No predefined syntax that you must adapt you
• Flexibel for other data integrations
• Event queue can be used for all kind of applications
Tested & Proven framework
26. Try it yourself!
The GDDL is an open source framework.
We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvements.
https://bitbucket.org/xploregroup/xploregroup-webanalytics-demo
