Adobe Launch, now Adobe Experience Platform Tags
Adobe Launch - renamed Adobe Experience Platform Tags, though almost everyone still says Launch - is Adobe's tag management system: the control layer that decides which measurement code loads on your pages, with what data, in what order. It succeeded Dynamic Tag Management, and it is where the AEP Web SDK is typically deployed from. When we audit an implementation, the Launch property is usually where the archaeology starts.
A tag manager earns its keep by making measurement changes reviewable and reversible: rules instead of scattered script edits, data elements instead of copy-pasted DOM lookups, publish flows with staging instead of edits in production. It also accumulates debt faster than any other part of the stack - orphaned rules firing on pages that no longer exist, three data elements reading the same cookie differently, extensions installed for campaigns nobody remembers. When we audit an implementation, the Launch property is usually where the archaeology starts.
The lineage: Satellite to DTM to Launch to Tags
Adobe's tag management story starts with Satellite, a tag manager built by Search Discovery that Adobe acquired in July 2013 and relaunched as Dynamic Tag Management. Launch followed as a ground-up successor, and today the product is Tags inside the Experience Platform data collection umbrella. The renames matter mostly for documentation searches: the product page says Tags, the community says Launch, and job postings say both. What changed over that arc is the deployment model - extensions as a marketplace, libraries as versioned builds, and first-class support for deploying the Web SDK rather than legacy AppMeasurement.
FAQ
Is Adobe Launch free?
Client-side Tags carries no separate license fee - Adobe offers it to Experience Cloud customers as an included feature. Two things are not included: server-side event forwarding, which needs a Real-Time CDP entitlement or a separate collection license metered on outgoing calls, and the operational cost of tag management - the engineering discipline to keep rules, data elements, and publish flows clean enough that a change made today does not corrupt a metric next quarter.
Is DTM still supported?
No. Adobe made DTM properties read-only on 22 February 2021 and decommissioned the product on 20 April 2021. Libraries already published kept serving, which is why some sites still run DTM code with no console behind it. Anything still structurally resembling a DTM setup - even if it was migrated into Launch mechanically - is worth a design review, because mechanical migrations preserved old habits alongside old rules.
What is the difference between Adobe Launch and the AEP Web SDK?
Launch is the delivery mechanism; the Web SDK is the payload. Launch decides when and how code loads on the page, while the Web SDK (alloy.js) is the library that actually sends data to Adobe's Edge Network. A modern implementation typically uses Launch to deploy and configure the Web SDK.