Will Adobe Launch (or Dynamic Tag Manager – DTM) slow my site down?
Well, a better question would be how much impact would it have on the page speed?
And the answer is: so much as you want.
Adobe Launch (and most other Tag Managers in the industry) are just containers with bare minimum code/methods to make it work. Code weight can increase as teams keep adding more and more custom functionalities into Launch and execute additional actions.
You want A/B testing or personalization by Target on the page, and you want it to load asap to avoid flickers, you would load Launch synchronously. And then your “preferred” speed test tool will complain of synchronous scripts that should be done away with.
The paranoia can drive you to optimize the wrong things. I have seen customers worrying after a browser debugger said 47% of code in the Adobe Launch library appeared redundant! (it’s the interpretation to blame)
What this means is, the tools do not always know what you want. And you need to decide whom to trust.
There are numerous other things you should optimize to make your site faster.
The above used an example of Adobe Launch or other TMSs like Tealium or Ensighten/GTM. However, apply common sense to every other marketing script you deploy on the digital property. Does it need to load synchronously? Can the number of network calls be minimized? Can we move some of these server-side?
How it “feels like”: If you deliver a great user experience right from the beginning while loading additional content in the background, and even pre-loading the probable next pages, you should not be penalized. Modern search engines understand UX well and the page load factor plays a minuscule role compared to your site’s likeability.
Reduce the number of network calls, the number of SSL handshakes (look at WebSDK in place of standalone libraries from Adobe), and whatnot. It’s not the goal of this post. There are great resources on Google and elsewhere.
A certain large automotive company’s website, on average, took 11 seconds to load in a particular market (with low average internet speed). Care must be taken to reduce those painful calls for resources than just Analytics. In fact, we helped them remove the libraries and have bare-bone custom functions to send data to Adobe Analytics. Something is better than nothing. Unless you have a transaction to make on that site, you would not wait for content that you can easily find elsewhere.
By the way, have you explored Event Forwarding on the Edge from Adobe? Or similar features with your preferred vendor? There are smart ways to send in data in a standard format, and apply a whole lot of logic before sending them to their destinations server-side.
