Multi-brand Adobe Launch setup: Global and brand report suites with brand GA4 properties

Step 1 of 9: 1Create the Global and brand report suites

The Global report suite is the one that receives every brand's hits: Adobe describes a global report suite as one that collects data from all the domains and apps your organization owns. A brand suite receives only its own brand's hits. Both are ordinary report suites; what makes one "global" is that every brand sends its hits to it as well.

You need access to Adobe Analytics through the Admin Console, which a system-level administrator grants. Then, for each environment, starting with development:

1. In Adobe Analytics open Admin, then Report Suites, and select Add Report Suite.
2. Choose a predefined template, or an existing report suite as the template. Only settings are copied, not data.
3. Complete the report suite fields (Adobe lists them on a separate page; match them to your interface) and select Create Report Suite.

A report suite ID can be at most 40 bytes and the friendly name at most 255 bytes. Put the environment and the role in the ID, for example grpglobaldev for the Global suite and grpbrandadev to grpbranddev for the brands; the examples in this guide use that pattern, with stg and prod for the other environments.

Create the Global suite first and set it up completely: in its settings (Admin, Report Suites, Edit Settings), enable the eVars, props and success events from the variable map in step 2, with their allocation and expiration. Then create each brand suite with the Global suite as its template. Only settings are copied, so a brand suite arrives with the same variables enabled and a number means the same thing in all five suites. If Brand A used eVar2 for page type and Brand B used it for a campaign, the Global suite would mix unrelated values in one report. Compare the five suites once before you go on.

Wherever two suite IDs appear in this guide, the Global ID comes first. Adobe's best practice for multi-suite tagging is to list the Global report suite first. Repeat this step for staging and production when development works.

Step 2 of 9: 2Write the variable map and the data layer contract

Agree one table that every brand follows. Page names start with the brand, because the Global suite receives four sites that would otherwise all have a page called "home".

The pages push the same two objects on every brand's site. Use the Adobe Client Data Layer as in the step-by-step implementation guide linked at the end, and put the array above the Tags embed code:

<script>
  window.adobeDataLayer = window.adobeDataLayer || [];
  window.adobeDataLayer.push({
    event: "page-load",
    page: { name: "brand-a:home", type: "home", brand: "brand-a" }
  });
</script>

When a visitor adds a product to the cart, the page pushes a second event:

window.adobeDataLayer.push({
  event: "add-to-cart",
  product: { id: "SKU-1001", name: "Trail Backpack", price: 89.9, quantity: 1, currency: "EUR" }
});

Step 3 of 9: 3Build the shared data elements in the brand's property

In the Brand A property, install the Adobe Client Data Layer extension and create the data elements below. Everything in this table is identical in all four properties except the last row.

Keep the brand name in this one data element. The rules contain no brand name, so building Brand B, C and D means changing Brand ID, the report suites in the Analytics extension and the account in the Google extension, and a copy-and-paste mistake has three places to hide, not dozens.

Step 4 of 9: 4Install the Adobe Analytics extension and set both report suites

In the Brand A property, open Extensions, then Catalog, find Adobe Analytics and install it. Then configure it:

1. Under Library management, choose Manage the library for me. The other choices (use the library already on the page, load it from a custom URL, provide custom library code) also take report suites per environment, but this one needs no library file of your own.
2. In the report suite fields for Development, Staging and Production, specify the report suites. Enter the Global ID first and the brand ID second, separated by a comma with no spaces – the form Adobe documents for multiple report suite IDs:

1. Under General, set Currency Code to the currency the brand's site sends, because it sets the conversion rate for revenue and currency events. Leave Character Set at UTF-8 unless your site uses another encoding; Adobe recommends matching the site. If you use the Experience Cloud ID Service extension, leave Tracking Server empty: Adobe advises against filling it in then.
2. Under Link Tracking, decide whether to track download links and outbound links. Each one you switch on adds link hits, so test them like the page view.
3. Leave Global Variables empty for this setup. They set variables when the tracker starts on each page, which suits pages that send one beacon; Adobe recommends rules for single-page apps, and the rules in step 5 already set the brand.

Save the extension. A rule cannot change the report suite later, so these report suite fields are the single place to get right. (s.sa() in custom code can change it for a rare case such as a video suite, but it is not part of this architecture.)

Step 5 of 9: 5Send the page view and the add-to-cart event to Adobe Analytics

Create a rule named Adobe – Page view. Use the Adobe Client Data Layer Data Pushed event for the specific event page-load. Add two actions from the Adobe Analytics extension. Set Variables fills the variables, and Send Beacon sends them: the extension does not send a beacon from Set Variables.

Create a second rule, Adobe – Add to cart, on the Data Pushed event add-to-cart:

The Products value follows the Adobe Analytics product syntax: category (empty here), product, quantity and total price. The price is the total for the quantity, which is why step 3 built Product Total. Set eVar1 in this rule too, so the link hit carries the brand.

Because the report suites are set in the extension, both rules send to the Global suite and the brand suite without any further setting.

Step 6 of 9: 6Install the Google Global Site Tag extension and add the brand's GA4 account

In the Brand A property, open Extensions, then Catalog, find Google Global Site Tag (gtag) and install it. Adobe's page says the extension sends data to Google Analytics, Google Ads and the Google Marketing Platform through gtag.js, and that installing extensions needs the manage_properties permission. It also lists the extension under Destinations, then Catalog.

During the installation, select Add Account. Adobe's Google Ads walkthrough fills this dialog with an account name, an account ID and a product. For GA4, give the account a name such as Brand A GA4, choose the Google Analytics 4 product if your list offers it, and enter Brand A's measurement ID (G-AAAAAAAAAA) as the account ID. If your interface asks for the account per environment, enter the development, staging and production measurement IDs; use a development GA4 property for development if you have one, so that test events stay out of the live reports.

Adobe notes that multiple accounts per product can be configured. In this architecture each property holds one GA4 account: its own brand's. That is what keeps Brand B's events out of Brand A's property.

Step 7 of 9: 7Send the add-to-cart event to GA4

You do not need a rule for the page view: once the extension has loaded gtag.js with the brand's measurement ID, GA4 collects page_view itself (see the section on what is recorded before any rule). Sending it from a rule as well would count every page twice.

Add the business event to the existing rule Adobe – Add to cart. Adobe's walkthrough for the same extension shows the flow: in the rule, select Add under Actions, choose Google Global Site Tag (gtag) from the Extension dropdown, and select Send an event under Action Type. Then fill in the event:

Place the action below the Adobe actions: actions in one rule run in the configured order. The Google Ads walkthrough adds custom fields as a key and a data element, which is how the two fields above are entered.

GA4 expects the products of an ecommerce event in items, an array of objects. A field that holds one key and one value cannot express that. If your interface cannot build the array, send this one event with a Custom Code action instead. The extension has already added the gtag code, so the code calls gtag directly:

if (window.gtag) {
  gtag("event", "add_to_cart", {
    currency: _satellite.getVar("Product Currency"),
    value: Number(_satellite.getVar("Product Total")),
    items: [{
      item_id: _satellite.getVar("Product ID"),
      item_name: _satellite.getVar("Product Name"),
      price: Number(_satellite.getVar("Product Price")),
      quantity: Number(_satellite.getVar("Product Quantity"))
    }]
  });
}

Use either the extension action or this code for the event, not both. Each property has one GA4 account, so every event goes to that brand's property by default and no send_to is needed. If you later add a group-level GA4 property, give both IDs to a group with gtag("config", id, { groups: "brand" }) and route the events with send_to: "brand"; a group name cannot contain a dash.

Step 8 of 9: 8Build, publish to development and repeat for each brand

Open Publishing, select the development library, add all changed resources, save and build it. Load a development page of Brand A that has the Brand A development embed code.

Then build Brand B, C and D the same way. Before you publish any of them, compare the four properties: the rules, the data elements and the extension settings should match, apart from Brand ID, the report suites in the Analytics extension and the account in the Google extension. Do the QA below for each brand, then repeat the whole sequence for staging and production, with their own suites and GA4 accounts.

Step 9 of 9: 9Verify the hits in the browser

Check the hit before you check the reports, because the reports lag.

Adobe Analytics. Open the developer tools, select the Network panel, reload and filter for /b/ss/. The request path after /b/ss/ holds the report suite IDs: it should show the Global ID, a comma and the brand ID. The browser sends one image request. Adobe's servers then make a primary call to the Global suite and a secondary call to the brand suite.

GA4. Use Google Tag Assistant for the test: it adds a parameter to the page address that turns on debug mode. In GA4, open Admin, then Data display, then DebugView. The seconds stream shows the events of the last 60 seconds: expect one page_view per page and an add_to_cart with its parameters after the click.

Reports. Adobe's processing is not instant. Allow about two hours before comparing report suite totals.