Launch has a lot of 3rd party tags (see example below) that are supported as extensions which can be deployed via a user friendly UI and the list is ever growing but there will always be a need to deploy 3rd party tags that won't be available in the catalog.
As an example, below is a screenshot from the Adobe Advertising Cloud extension UI that makes it very easy to deploy this pixel without writing any custom JavaScript.
This post shows how to deploy a 3rd party tag called PepperJam not yet added to Launch and covers the various steps needed to to get it done successfully. Let's take a look.
- Evaluate 3rd Party Tag Deployment Documentation: Typically, you will get a tag deployment/requirement documentation from your vendor. Once you get the 3rd party tag documentation from the agency or vendor, make sure to go through it to understand the JavaScript snippet, where the tag needs to fire, what attributes need to be passed and how to test the snippet. These are some of the key questions required that need to be answered before deploying any 3rd party tag.
- Capture all relevant Meta Data using Data Elements: In this case, the vendor requires us to capture the currency code, order total, order ID and a query string parameter called "clickid" that needs to be persisted for the visitor. In the next two screenshots, we create two data elements. The first data element captures the order total by tying directly to a data layer/JSON attribute on the page called dataLayer.orderTotal. The second data layer captures a query string parameter called "clickid" that needs to be persisted for the visitor and we've used the "Visitor" duration. This post covers persistence in Launch in more detail.
- Create a Rule: The first step in a Launch rule is to create an event. In this case, our event is page load and we're going to choose "DOM Ready" to fire this event. DOM ready is an event which is executed when the document object model has loaded. The next step is to choose a condition. In our case, we want to fire the pixel on a page called activewear.html. You can validate the condition by putting in the URI in the Regular Expression Tester as shown below.
- Implement the PepperJam Pixel: The last step in the pixel implementation process is to add an action within the existing rule. We do that by clicking on "Open Editor" and pasting the JavaScript snippet provided by the vendor. Take note of the two highlighted data elements in the screenshot from the code snippet which have been manually added to the pixel to pass additional meta data.
- Validate the PepperJam Pixel: The final step is to validate the pixel in a browser. As per the first screenshot below, we can see that additional attributes (meta data) such as amount and Click ID are populating based on the data elements tied to the data layer and query string parameter respectively. The second screenshot shows that the Click ID is still populated even if the clickid query parameter is not populated in the URL as we created a Visitor based data element.
Hope you found this post useful. Is there a 3rd party pixel that you've deployed in Launch that isn't supported via an extension yet?
