How to Use Activity Map to Optimise Websites and Digital Properties

ActivityMap enables marketers and business users to explore visitors’ interactions, traffic, conversion, and pathing in real time to better optimise websites and digital properties. Its intuitive, easy-to-use interface overlays important information directly on webpages and digital properties. Marketers and business users can then easily change the information displayed to see how visitors respond to different elements, improving performance and reducing visitor loss.

Overview of the Activity Map Browser Plugin

For a web page to use Activity Map, it must have a JavaScript function that activates the module on its DOM when a user loads the page. This will create a network request that is fired off to Adobe Analytics. When this occurs, the link tracking data will be returned to the browser and viewed within the Activity Map visualisation of the web page. This is also how you can confirm that a particular link is being tracked by the module.

The Activity Map browser plugin provides a visual overlay of link tracking data across your website (including quantitate ranking in both historic and in real-time data). This can be accessed by clicking on elements or links on your website, or using the Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger. This can be useful for testing and validating whether or not Activity Map is passing link tracking data to Adobe Analytics.

How to Use Activity Map – Dedicated User Interface

The dedicated Activity Map user interface offers an interactive 2D or 3D view of devices and their connections based on protocol activity. This can be used to troubleshoot connectivity issues and identify potential bottlenecks. You can add up to 5 steps to your map and create filters to exclude or include devices in the map.

In addition, you can add an ad hoc group of sources to quickly investigate traffic originating from multiple devices in the same map. You can also create a basic activity map that displays one step, or level, of device connections between origin devices and peer devices on your network.

How to Access the Activity Map – Desktop Tools

Once you’ve enabled Activity Map on your website, access can be granted to specific groups or individual users via Adobe Experience Cloud User Administration console. This is a quick way to give your business stakeholders and other users access to Activity Map reporting on their own devices, without having to have an Adobe Experience Cloud subscription or any Adobe Analytics subscription.

How to Access the Activity Map in the Browser – Plugin

To use the Activity Map browser plugin, you will need to have a Google Chrome web browser installed and enable the extension. This can be done through the Chrome Web Store by searching for ‘Activity Map’ and clicking ‘Download’. Once the extension is installed on your browser, you can use the ‘Search’ tool to find pages that have the ‘Activity Map’ module implemented.

How to Use Activity Map – Analytics Variables

The main Adobe Analytics variables that are passed to Activity Map are the URL and Page ID. These variables are inserted into the first and second requests that are fired off to Adobe Analytics. You can then use these values to analyse the content and context of the request. This can be a great way to identify and investigate link tracking issues that may have arisen when implementing the Activity Map module on your website.