Welcome to the complicated world of Adobe mar-tech technologies where everything united under Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe's new naming of Adobe Launch and suite of data collection technologies.
Adobe loves to rename its products along with its terminology which is very confusing for users but there is nothing we can do.
Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Launch used to be a separate thing but now they are one. So basically Adobe Experience Platform what would be equivalent of Google's its own data collections products or tag manager tools like GTM or Tealium's IQ and other server side data collections products.
The UI in Adobe Experience Platform that provides these capabilities has now been renamed as the Data Collection UI along with other rebrandings:
Platform Launch (Client Side) is now named as Tags
Platform Launch Server Side named as Event forwarding
Edge configurations is named as Datastreams
Adobe initially had bought Satellite as a tag manager but it was a pretty bad choice as it was creating lots of issues even for Adobe Analytics implementation, I had rejected to use it. But luckily Adobe did a great decision to create a new tag manager, Adobe Launch which makes easy to implement and integrate Adobe Marketing cloud products. (yes marketing cloud name also gone lol)
Complicated here does not mean it is bad, it is the reality of mar tech technologies. My goal here is to help you to understand this complexity. Mar tech has gotten so complex
Do I have to use Adobe Experience Platform to install Adobe products like Adobe Analytics?
No. You even don't have to use tag manager (although it is preferred) But you also don't have too many options. I don't recommend implementing Adobe Analytics native as it would require lots of Adobe Analytics native know-how and it would increase your development, work and also you would have no access to general data layer but Adobe Target have to be implemented natively for some cases.
I would not recommend to use Google Tag Manager GTM to install any Adobe products as GTM is not very compatible with Adobe's technology( Once some people in my company tried it, I said you will fail and they did)
But you can also use Tealium IQ instead of Adobe Launch if you already have Tealium, it is a very good tag manager that is compatible with Adobe and I have been using to install Adobe Analytics since 2013.
How to Implement What is Adobe Experience Platform for Websites?
Like any other client side web tag manager tools, we simply add custom JS code to the all pages but adding this code is only start, the real work is to collect data.
How to Collect Data with What is Adobe Experience Platform for Websites?
This is the most important step for all mar tech implementations , because you will use this data for all your technologies. This is a very important step that I will explain in details in another article. In summary you need to work with a very good data architect (somebody like me) who has an experience in developing data layer for different technologies and companies with tag management. This person would work with the business users to understand what kind of data they use or need, then data architect would use this information to develop a data layer that will be effective and can serve all technologies. Of course data architect needs to work with development team to create technical requirements that will be compatible with website's code architecture.. More to follow
In order to use Adobe Experience Platform on WEB we will use WEB SDK extension.
In order to use Adobe Experience Platform on mobile apps we will use Mobile SDK extension.
Last introductory information you need to know about this platform is, you have noth client side and server side capabilities which would be discussed in other posts.
I think it is enough as a beginning article, if you need any real support , please reach out to me on Linkedin.
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