Create data elements in Experience Platform tags for Analytics implementation

Transcript

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video, I want to talk about creating data elements for your analytics implementation in Launch. So here we are in Launch, and we’re going to go over to the Data Elements. Click on that. And we’re going to create some data elements. I don’t have any yet. So we’re going to get those going. So, how do I know which data elements I need to create? Well, we go back to our SDR, right? Our solution design. Our blueprint for our site, to see where we’re going to get the data. And, in this case, we’re going to get a bunch of it from the data layer. We’re going to get one from a query string parameter, et cetera, but we want to set these data points into data elements so that we can use them in rules, and throughout Launch. So we’ll just dive right in here. I don’t have a ton of them that I need to create, but I have a few different types. I’m going to start with Page Name and Site Section, and we see where we’re going to pull those from here. And you can see that if I go to a page, if I go, for example, to one of the pages on my site, and I look at the source, I view the source, you’ll see that there’s actually digitalData, page, pageName, and there’s also digitalData, page, siteSection. And so I can drill down on those to grab those values dynamically. So we go back into Launch, create new data element, call this one Page Name, and we’re going to select the data element type, and this is a JavaScript variable. And here it is, and you can see even the example has dataLayer.products1.price, et cetera, so just an example there. So we will go, again, back to our data layer, because we have already grabbed this, and I’ll select digitalData.page.pageName and paste that right in. So now we have that, we can decide how long that needs to last. It can be, really, no storage, because it’s going to be coming in on every page. It’s a good idea to clean the text in case there’s any spaces or anything around it, and you can decide whether to force a lower-case value or not. If you think it might come in in different cases, you may want to go ahead and force lower-case value. So I’ll do that. And then we just save that. And that will automatically start that build, but I’m going to go ahead and create another one for Site Section.

Again, JavaScript variable. And I’ll just jump over and we will take the Site Section path there and put that in. Do the same thing. And save and build that. And you can see that these will go pretty fast as long as you know what those paths are to that data layer element. So if we jump back now, well, I know that if I want to grab one that is in the query string parameter, and that is for the search term, and we’ve determined that when we do a search on the page, it goes up into a query string parameter of q, so let’s create that one. Now we create a new data element. This is the search term. And this time, instead of JavaScript variable, we’re going to go down to query string parameter. And that’s easy, just put in a q. And in case they put a capital q or a lower-case q, it’ll grab either one of those, and we’ll do this again, and maybe we’ll go ahead and force lower-case value this time, because you never know if people are going to search upper-case, lower-case, et cetera, so we’ll do that. And then we just save that one. We’re really movin’ along here. Okay, if we jump back to our SDR again. So we’ve done the data layer for the page name, site section, and those are also down here, going into props. We know that we did the query string parameter. So we also need the product ID, so we’ll need that one as we go through the cart and those kinds of things. And so I’ve also listed that one here, but I just want to make sure what that one is, and so I’m going to go back to my site and go to the page, when I’ve actually purchased a product, or you can look at one where there’s been a checkout of a product, et cetera. In any case, there’s a product ID, and there’s a product name. This is a tuxedo and then here’s the SKU. It’s a really good practice in products to use something that’s not going to change. And so that’s typically the SKU, and we can use classifications later to put a friendly name on it like this, so I recommend that we use the product ID on that, so we’ll need digitalData.product.productID, and so I think that’s what I had in there. So let’s just take a look here, and I just want to make sure that there’s no space. It looked like there was, yeah. So let’s take that space out. digitalData.product.productID looks good.

So we’ll grab that one.

And we’ll go back to Launch, create another data element for the product. We even put product ID. This will be a JavaScript variable, and there’s that one. And we don’t need to force lower-case on that, but we’ll clean text. Okay, just a couple more here. So we’ve done the product ID right there. We’ve got these three, which covers those two as well. Now the only other thing that we need, really, is this product event, because on different pages throughout that checkout process, we’re going to have to see, is the product event set at product view, or is it cart view, checkout, purchase, et cetera. And I can see that I capitalized that bad, so it’s probably this one. We’ll have to double check that. If we go back to one of our pages here and look at the source, and it is productEvent like this, so digitalData.product.productEvent with capital E. And you can see it’ll be checkout or it’ll be purchase or it’ll be whatever, so. We’re going to go back in, and we’re going to grab it from this one that looks good here.

And then we’ll go to Launch, add another data element, product event, again, with a JavaScript variable.

And add that one.

Looks good.

Clean the text.

Save it. And you’ll see doing this, of course, it saved it to our working library, so we don’t have to go into publishing and run another build, because it was building every time, but in any case, those are the data elements that we needed according to our solution design. We’ll be using the product event and seeing what that is in our rules, we’ll be using our page name and site section and search term and I almost forgot the product ID. Cart ID, no we did product ID, we need cart ID to put into the purchase ID, so we’ll do one more.

And we’ll call this Order ID.

And we’ll put that in there and it’s actually cart ID in our data layer, and that is that, folks. So, hope this was helpful, and you’ll go through your STR, create all the data elements that you need. Good luck.