The digital analytics industry is facing significant issues as major platforms like Google and Adobe push for migrations to GA4 and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA). These migrations have been plagued by poor implementation, largely due to over-reliance on large consulting firms and subcontractors lacking expertise. This has resulted in frustrated clients, failed projects, and a tarnished industry reputation. However, smaller agencies have an opportunity to step up by focusing on quality, transparency, and client education. The industry must realign incentives, demand transparency, and foster innovation to create a client-first ecosystem that prioritizes genuine customer success over vendor-driven sales goals. This is a call to action to reclaim the industry from monopolistic practices and build a better future for digital analytics.

For those data professionals, of which there are MANY, whose primary outputs are things like data collection, reporting, PowerPoint presentations, writing code, and deploying data tools, if these activities are seen as the core of their work rather than as means to deliver real, tangible value, they are on a dangerous path.

Adobe's Opt-In Service has some advantages I don't see folks talk about much:
1. It manages consent for all of your Adobe tools, without requiring you to add conditions to our existing Analytics logic
2. When your existing variable-and-beacon-setting logic runs while the user is opted out, Adobe queues that logic up, holding on to it just in case the user does opt in. Any Adobe logic can run, but no cookies are created and no beacons get fired until Adobe’s opt-in service says it’s ok.

Hear from 33 Sticks Principal Architect, Jenn Kunz, and 33 Sticks Principal Optimization Strategist, Jason Boal, about how you and your organization should be thinking about MarTech server-side technology.

Hear from 33 Sticks Principal Implementation Architect, Jenn Kunz, on how best to maintain the health of your marketing technology ecosystem.

Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) had a few different deployment options:

1. An Adobe/Akamai-hosted library (ie, your embed code starts with “//assets.adobedtm.com”)

2. An FTP self-hosted library (DTM would push changes through FTP to a location on your own servers)

3. A downloaded self-hosting option (you would manually download after changes and put onto your servers).

Technically, all three of these options also exist in Adobe Launch, though the approach is slightly different. Since I ended up having to get some clarification from Adobe on how to use Launch to copy these methods, I figured I’d document my findings here . When creating an adapter, you have the option of Managed by Adobe or SFTP.

Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager has always given developers a chance to define exactly when a rule was called, by firing _satellite.track("insert rule name here"). This is called a Direct Call Rule (or DCR). They didn’t always get a ton of product love- after all, Event Based Rules don’t require work from developers and have so many more options- but many DTM users used them heavily because of the control they provided and how incredibly straightforward they were.

If a tag management solution is the framing of your dream house, the data layer is the foundation upon which your dream house will be built. However very few organizations get ex- cited about laying a foundation, especially the people in those organizations writing the checks. So why should your organization invest needed money and talent to deploy a solid data layer foundation?

This eBook, brought to you by 33 Sticks, is a robust guide covering the history of digital analytics data collection, data layer best practices and governance, and business exam- ples to help make the case for an investment in a data layer.

And that is it! If you are familiar with Adobe DTM, you can utilize this process to deploy YouTube Tracking, using Adobe Analytics, across your entire site in less than an hour.