Why You Should Think About Adobe Launch Migration?

Introduction#

Have you been wondering why we have Adobe Launch in picture, when the current Dynamic tag management solution is better fitted with the organizational goals? Read through the article to find improvements, limitations, timelines and migration steps.?

In layman terms, “Launch” simply means to introduce something new, and in similar line Adobe introduces Adobe Launch over its existing tag management system. The new solution provides customers with an easy way to deploy and manage all of analytics, marketing and advertising tags which has a simpler interface than the DTM.

Adobe Launch is just over a year old, and within a span of one year, we have seen multiple changes around the current technology. The new TMS serves multiple benefits for the user to explore, including the ones mentioned below:

1. Extension marketplace is one of the top-notch facility available to the Adobe launch community. Anyone who wants to share their extension with the community can easily do by creating their own experiences.
2. The scope is also to add around multiple variable types and trigger conditions, together with various tag additions.
3. Launch has better control over each part of tag management including actions around load tag, set variables, fire page view, or fire event.
4. Adobe Launch library is 60% lighter than that of Dynamic Tag Management and 40% lighter than Google Tag Manager
5. Adobe’s Launch has been so special when it comes to workflow improvements, specially over DTM. Development, Staging & Production are the three default environments, though you always have the option to create as many environments as you need. For each environment, there is a separate script to be placed on the web pages.
6. For deployment, two methods are available to be used: asynchronous and synchronous. With asynchronous deployment, website that prioritize page speed load and efficiency can easily be managed.
7. With Adobe Launch, there has been a serious improvement over HTML Injection. In DTM, this function was very limited as it was loaded through an iframe with an src value set at “//assets.dtm..”.

Now that we have a fair understanding around the functionality that Adobe Launch can provide to the user and the vendors, it is equally important to know the deadline for the migration. What next is to understand the migration process from DTM to Launch platform.

Timelines#

• July 9, 2019 - Options to create new DTM properties, No Longer available.
• July 14, 2019 - All DTM web properties become read-only
• Jan 12, 2021 - DTM servers go to sleep

With Adobe Launch being available to all the Experience Cloud users, the next step is to focus around migrating the properties from Adobe DTM to Adobe Launch. Steps to migrate by selecting the “Upgrade to Launch” Button in DTM.

1. Use Launch without changing the page code
2. Import DTM properties into Launch (hit “Upgrade to Launch” button)
3. New property in Launch
4. Development platform for Testing: Test the new changes to ensure that the business logic behaves as expected
5. Staging platform for Testing: Test Launch container tags in Staging environments
6. Publishing to Production & update to reference the Launch production embed code

Some of these limitations may be addressed through future extensions, but Launch is already a drastic improvement to DTM. Now, to start afresh, Testing & QA strategy should be given utmost importance as your digital ecosystem performance depends highly on how the production environment functions which ultimately must do more with how the staging environment has been positioned.

To run the tests faster, one can try with Launch Command which is simply the Chrome extension that provides an easy streamlined testing process - much faster, easier and simpler, always reflective of what’s on production, without the slightest deviation. With this, you have the option to toggle a switch in chrome that reaches into Launch, pick the development or the staging library to finally apply that locally to the website. In short, this is simply the time saving process to set you quickly test the deployment or the staging environment without much fuss or hurry.

Now that we have an idea why we want to have the next generation, enterprise-ready tag management system in our organization, let’s put the top five reasons to migrate to the new system from DTM and start moving (if not already) to the new platform.

• More powerful in terms of new features and capabilities in Launch including easier implementation of multiple technologies through extensions, faster page load time, tag management and control, dedicated pre-rollout staging environment for quality assurance, work-flow automation to name few.
• Improving the overall customer experience through asynchronous library load. Also, Adobe Launch is much lighter than the earlier version of DTM and the updated tag insertion methods makes it even faster.
• Provides opportunity for non-technical members to access and run easily as Launch keeps on expanding the extension catalog as part of improvisation.
• Launch can fit your organization’s expectations more easily, be it centralizing the core tagging for ‘n’ number of sites or automating your analytics requirements.
• Its official, Launch is the future of your tag management process. Though DTM is still there to support for some time, but any property development or creation can only be done through Launch. With this, we will see more of functional developments which will ultimately lead to more of functional advantages.

Closing Notes#

So, what are you thinking? Go get the migration done, and once you are with the new Adobe Launch powerhouse, you must feel happy and relief as this TMS is sure to provide you with wonders in terms of new advancements and speed, that might be something you have been craving from quite a time.