I have a website that was recently moved to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). AEM can expose data via the adobeDataLayer. However, the tagging solution used and analytics tools used are GTM and GA4 (Google products). How can I make sure that GTM can read the adobeDataLayer and then send event data to GTM?
I was thinking of mapping window.dataLayer to window.adobeDataLayer via a custom HTML Tag in GTM. But not sure what is the correct procedure. Does anyone have experience with this?
No need to map anything though you can do that.
GTM allows you to change the name of its data layer. by default it looks for the window.dataLayer, but take a close look at GTM's snippet and you'll see that you can edit the name. You can go to this question for more details: Can I Use a Custom Data Layer Name in GTM?
The reason why AEM uses a different name for the DL (data layer) is because it supports its way superior and a lot more expensive analytics system called Adobe Analytics, for which they also have their own TMS called Adobe Launch (which they renamed into Adobe Tags) and in Launch one can install the ACDL extension (Adobe Client Data Layer), which by default uses the window.adobeDataLayer array for listening to the front-end.
Before anyone asks - yes, it's possible to have both GTM and Launch to listen to the same array. They are very careful at overriding the DL's .push() method.
Note that what AEM pushes into the DL by default is not that much. It's common to see AEM sites using other DLs, ignoring its native one.