All digital analytics tools have an administration area where the analytics team assigns, names and configures variables for the implementation. This administration area must be updated with the specific implementation variable settings such as variable name, variable type and other tool-specific items. Traditionally, this administration area has been difficult to maintain since changes often occur within an implementation. These changes also have to be done manually, which is very time consuming.

Since Apollo has all of the information related to your implementation in its database, the Data Destination portion of the deployment process enables you to send the variable settings from Apollo to your analytics tool. This can be done in a few seconds and ensures that all settings are correct and not negatively affected by human error.

The Data Destination feature leverages the same analytics tool API connection that was used to import your existing implementation (and possibly the same that was used to connect to the tag management system if you are using the same vendor’s TMS). Before you deploy the variable settings to the Data Destination, make sure you have everything configured properly, as there is no “undo” function once deployed (though you can always make manual updates in your analytics tool). See this article for how Apollo handles preconfigured variables that may exist in your Data Destination. Once your Data Destination settings have been deployed, you can look at your analytics tool administration area to see the changes.

Note that you can only update the data destination settings for one data set (i.e. Report Suite) at a time using the environment selected during the build process. If you need to update the data set configurations for multiple data sets, you would need to have an environment for each data set and use multiple Builds.