GDPR/ePrivacy compliance and server-side forwarding

Last update: 2024-01-25
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This section explains enhancements to server-side forwarding that were prompted by the EU cookie compliance regulation, which went into effect on Sept. 30, 2017.

Server-side forwarding is used to share data from Adobe Analytics to other Experience Cloud Solutions, such as Audience Manager, in real time. When enabled, server-side forwarding also allows Analytics to push data to other Experience Cloud solutions and for those solutions to push data to Analytics during the data collection process.

Previously, server-side forwarding did not have a way to delineate between consent and pre-consent events/hits. As of November 1, 2018, you as the data controller (Adobe Analytics customer) have the option to restrict pre-consent data to Adobe Analytics, and prevent it from being forwarded to Adobe Audience Manager. A new implementation context variable lets you flag hits where consent has not been received. The variable, when set, prevents these hits from being sent to Adobe Audience Manager until consent has been received.

When this new context variable, cm.ssf=1, exists on a hit, this hit gets flagged and does not get server-side-forwarded to Adobe Audience Manager. Conversely, if this string does not appear on a hit, the hit gets forwarded to Adobe Audience Manager.

Server-side forwarding is bi-directional, meaning that when it is applied to a hit and that hit gets forwarded to Adobe Audience Manager, Audience Analytics receives segment information for that hit from Adobe Audience Manager and sends it back to Analytics. As a result, any hits that are not server-side forwarded from Analytics to Adobe Audience Manager will not be enriched with the list of segment IDs from Adobe Audience Manager. Thus, there will be a subset of traffic/hits that will not get segment ID information from Adobe Audience Manager.

Implementation Details

Depending on your implementation method, follow these steps.

Implementation method Steps
Tags in Adobe Experience Platform Assuming that you have the Adobe Analytics extension installed, add the following context data variable definition to the custom code editor within the Action configuration of a Rule:
s.contextData['cm.ssf'] = '1'
Note: Define the contextdata variable and set it to 1 if a customer does not consent to targeted marketing. Set the contextdata variable to 0 for customers who consented to targeted marketing.
AppMeasurement Add the context data variable definition to the AppMeasurement.js file:
s.contextData['cm.ssf'] = '1'
Note: Define the contextdata variable and set it to 1 if a customer does not consent to targeted marketing. Set the contextdata variable to 0 for customers who consented to targeted marketing.

Reporting (Optional)

You can use Adobe Analytics to report on how much of your traffic is consent based and as a result has been server-side forwarded versus how much of your traffic isn’t consent based and has not been forwarded to Adobe Audience Manager.

To configure this type of reporting, map the new context variable to a custom traffic variable (prop) via processing rules. To do so

  1. Implement the “cm.ssf” variable (as shown above.)

  2. Enable the prop.

  3. Use processing rules to map the context variable to the prop.

    1. Go to Analytics > Admin > Report Suites , then select a report suite.
    2. Click Edit Report Suite > General > Processing Rules .
    3. Click Add Rule.
    4. Under Always Execute, overwrite the value of the prop you had enabled with the context variable “cm.ssf(Context Data)”.
    5. Click Save.

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