Adobe + Shopify = eCommerce Success
Your Exclusive Blueprint for Adobe Analytics Integration
Let’s say you’re a VP of analytics who manages your organization’s ecommerce system. You’ve already fully bought into Shopify, of course, but need to upgrade the way in which your organization captures user behavior. So then you turn to Adobe Analytics, of course, which is the gold standard for enterprise-level customer insights.
The question is: What must be done to bring the two together?
The answer is not obvious.
Adobe has no documentation about integrating its products into Shopify. Shopify has no documentation on integrating with Adobe Analytics. Search all you want, you won’t find a reliable resource that explains, in clear useful language, how to build a bridge between the two, because it doesn’t exist.
Until now.
I have written a very technical piece about integrating Adobe Analytics into Shopify — using Adobe Experience Platform Launch, currently called Tags — and am happy to share it with you.
The Prerequisite Checklist
Before going any further, we need to ensure that you’re properly set up to receive this information.
You need an understanding of Adobe Analytics. It’s good to know any analytics platform, but better to know Adobe. Google Analytics is more popular, but it is not as technical. A familiarity with Adobe Analytics requires a little more technical knowledge and awareness of nuance.
If you are, say, a digital product person who wants to make decisions based on data and insights, you’re in the right place. If you seek to create insights and reports and dashboards out of Adobe — this can be someone has basic knowledge, deep technical knowing or even high-level business knowledge — keep reading on.
Your Integration Timeline
Next, a question: When are you in the integration process?
Ideally, you should be reading this right as you commence building your website. Starting at the digital groundbreaking makes the most sense and will make integration easiest. It’s OK to do so, just before going live (sometimes this is the case).
But it’s important to know that it’s never too late to bring together Adobe Analytics and Shopify. If your eCommerce is situation is up and running, don’t worry, you can still combine these two powerful tools.
The Five Steps
No matter where your start, there are five steps in this integration dance.
- Step one is that you have to do the CNAME implementation. It’s all about enabling the first-party tracking server. We’ve learned that those who skip step one found there was an inflation in the visit count or session count, which a creates a problem with the all-important conversion-rate calculation.
- Step two: You must add the Adobe Launch script in the theme settings. That is, I have found, the biggest gap among retailers. Shopify wants every third-party pixel to be added in the store settings section called customer events, but Adobe Launch script doesn't work like that.
- Step three involves enabling the data layer object and choosing what type of events you want to track from the website.
- Step four is privacy. This step is optional, because not every brand or every partner will need it. But I highly recommend it. More brands are moving towards or considering a privacy API. There is precious little documentation on this topic, but it's a legal requirement and its importance increases daily, if not hourly. (Step four, I must add, it's the trickiest one. It is a custom solution. I included the code so the piece so that any developer could tweak the code, make it their own. It's just an example of what works for us.)
- Step five is all about the checkout script. This step is mandatory. It’s a very critical step because it tracks purchase behavior. For an e-commerce brand that is the most critical KPI. And Shopify has changed the way they track this behavior recently.
The five steps are clearly explained, in details, in the piece. But before we send you the piece to get busy integrating, it’s worth thinking about what you’ll get out of this exercise.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Integrate
What can you expect when you integrate?
Well, for one, you’ll get a reliable conversion rate. As retailers know, the conversion rate is perhaps the most essential eCommerce KPI.
Secondly, you’ll have much better compliance with privacy. Our solution will allow you to use any type of privacy, third-party privacy, their own tool, even that Shopify tool without worrying or spending too much time in figuring out how to integrate it. Our solution mitigates all those use cases seamlessly.
You should also anticipate that this integration process will involves much upfront technical work, but after that implementation, the scalability is quite easy. We’ve tried to create a solution that encompasses lot more use cases at once.
Still with me, VP? Great! Now go here and get the details!
