Data collection overview
ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform provides a suite of technologies that allow you to collect customer experience data from client-side sources, and send it to the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform Edge Network where it can be enriched, transformed, and distributed to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ or non-ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ destinations in seconds.
Data collection is supported for the following client-side sources:
- Web-based applications
- Native mobile applications
- Over-the-top (OTT) applications
Data collection focuses on the discoverability and accessibility of ingested datasets, encompassing the following:
This guide provides a high-level introduction to data collection and how it works to send data to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud products and non-ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ applications through the Platform Edge Network.
Tags, Web SDK, and Mobile SDK
The Platform Web SDK and Platform Mobile SDK collapse and compress all ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ product libraries into a single development kit for web and mobile platforms respectively. These can be implemented using raw code or using tags through the Data Collection UI or ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform UI.
Compressing these libraries speeds up data collection and consolidates operations into a single stream from client-side devices to the Platform Edge Network.
Platform Edge Network and datastreams edge
Platform Edge Network is a globally distributed, fast, and reliable network of servers capable of receiving and processing data at tremendous scale. Using tags, you can set up datastreams for products like ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Audience Manager, and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Analytics, which allow you to activate these products on the server side without changing client-side code.
In addition, datastreams are integrated with several Platform capabilities that help ensure that any sensitive data you are sending is handled appropriately with respect to organizational policies and legal regulations. See the section on handling sensitive data in the datastreams documentation for more information.
Event forwarding
Event forwarding can tap into any Experience Platform datastream, allowing you to transform, enrich, and send data to any non-ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ destination with extreme low latency and without adding any third-party code to the client device.
Next steps
This document provided a high-level overview of how data collection works to automate the process of sending your collected customer experience data to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ products and third-party destinations.
For more information on the general workflow involved in sending event data through the Edge Network, refer to the end-to-end overview.