How To Get Started After Purchase

After you purchased a product, you will receive a link to download a comprehensive excel file.

The file shall be used:

As as a tool agnostic blueprint to start from scratch with a best practice tracking for websites, shops, apps or to advance existing tracking.
As a blueprint for DEV tickets you need to set up for implementation. The DEV ticket templates are fully described and represent our ticket best practices. You can also use the ticket templates to adapt them to your own tracking implementation.
To develop new structured data layers or advance existing data layers as a foundation for the tracking with your analytics tool.
To get a blueprint how to set up tracking for internal promotions and which information you should send with "view" and "select".
To understand structured data layers, inspect full data layer examples and which information should be available with different kind of events.
To be inspired by the use cases to set up the described tracking or your own tracking system.

To familiarize yourself with the Standard Tracking approach CDE uses to structure tracking data.
To get inspiration how to design your own tracking when you implement your own custom tracking.

Product Description

This overview describes the “Standard Tracking Concept”, which contains of up to 19 tracking areas.

You will find the following tabs in the excel file:

Business Description
Tech Specs & DEV Template
Internal Promotion Specs
Full Data Layer Examples
Tracking Examples

Business Description

The Business Description tab delivers a full overview of the standard tracking, including calculated metrics and "why you need this" examples. Additionally, the business description serves as a template for your own documentation.

Table columns:

Interface Variable Name (name of the variable in the analytics tool, in clear language)
Data Layer key-value-pairs (data layer key example and possible values)
Format (of the variable, String or Number)
Explanation (in clear language what this variable/metric does)
"When and where to set" description (in clear language when this variable/metric shall be set)
"Why this variable/metric is needed" description (why you should implement this and what you can expect)
Calculated metrics - if applicable (name and formula of the calc. metric)
Scope (Hit, Session, User, Product)
Variable Source (Data Layer / Tag Manger, etc.)
Priority (for implementation, to set from you)
Comments (partially commented already, leaving space for your comments)
Release Date (to set from you)
Platform (on which of your platforms tracking is implemented, to set from you)
etc.

Tech Specs & DEV Template

The tab provides target group focussed information. As DEVS prefer to only read information relevant for their work, this tab delivers condensed and focussed information about each tracking area.

For all standard tracking areas there are individual DEV ticket templates, ready for copy and paste, with the following content:

A table with a tracking description, reduced to only tech/dev relevant information.
A full datalyer example to visualize the expected outcome.
The dev ticket template contains of
- title
- business description why we need the new data layer
- task description what is needed to be done
- technical table
- data layer example
- acceptance criteria

Internal Promotion Specs

This section is only available in the products "Standard Tracking Concept" & "Internal Promotion Tracking".

You find examples how to technically describe the elements you want to enable with Internal Promotion tracking. You will need to adapt this to your own elements on the site/shop/app.

The template provides answers to

how IP elements shall behave from a tracking perspective
which information shall be set with "view" & "select"

These specs are an add-on to the Internal Promotion tracking description to make the behavioral definition of Internal Promotion tracking easier for you. It is a very powerful and timesaving overview to discuss with the devs.

If you are new to Internal Promotion tracking: you need to define the elements that shall contain Internal Promotion tracking as described on the "Business Description Tab" and "Tech Specs & DEV Template" tab. The DEVs will ask into which elements they shall implement the IP tracking and which information shall be passed into which data layer key. The Internal Promotion Specs is the template to answer those questions.

Full Data Layer Examples

This tab provides examples how the full data layers can look like after implementation.

Our philosophy at CDE is to always use the entire context information in all pageviews and events. To show this we provide these examples.

If you resend the full data layer or not is a question how you want to process the existing data layer information. Anyway, the goal is to have the full context later in the analytics call. How you get there is up to you.

Use Cases

These tabs contain use cases for all 19 tracking areas covered by this concept. You will find examples of data layers, analytics hits with full context and some exemplary reports that show what you can analyse after implementation

The use cases are intended to helping you to get an idea and a better understand, how the tracking should be used and what the expected result should look like.