Lotame
Step-by-step guide to set up Lotame as a destination in RudderStack
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Step-by-step guide to set up Lotame as a destination in RudderStack
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Lotame is a popular data management and enrichment platform, used mainly for digital advertising. Its unique data solutions allow you to find new customers, improve engagement with them, and grow your revenue.
RudderStack supports syncing Lotame's BCP Pixel and DSP Pixel through our page
and identify
call.
BCP:The BCP, or Behavior Collection Point, is a JavaScript snippet that is placed on a web page. It is responsible for capturing the relevant user activity.
DSP: The DSP, or Demand-Side Platform, allows digital advertising inventory buyers to manage their ad exchange as well as data exchange accounts through a single interface.
To enable sending data to Lotame, you will first need to add it as a destination to the source from which you are sending your event data. Once the destination is enabled, events from our SDK will start flowing to Lotame.
Before configuring your source and destination on the RudderStack, please verify if the source platform is supported by Lotame, by referring to the table below:
Connection Mode
Web
Mobile
Server
Device mode
Supported
Supported
-
Cloud mode
-
-
-
To know more about the difference between Cloud mode and Device mode in RudderStack, read the RudderStack connection modes guide.
Once you have confirmed that the platform supports sending events to Lotame, perform the steps below:
From your RudderStack dashboard, select Lotame as a destination.
Give a name to the destination and select the source to connect to this destination. Then, click on Next. You should see the following screen:
Lotame Destination Settings on the RudderStack dashboard
You can provide multiple BCP and DSP URL templates in the settings dashboard by clicking on the ADD MORE option as seen above. Once specified, RudderStack includes these sources of image pixels in the web app. To provide the URLs, please use the below template:
RudderStack supports simple Handlebar expressions for the URLs. It uses the values provided by you in the Map all the fields section to replace the expressions, and the final URL as src
.
Android iOS Please follow the steps below to add Lotame to your Android Project:
Add the following repository
to your app/build.gradle
file.
Then, add the following dependencies
in the same file:
Finally, change the initialization of your RudderClient
in your Application
class, as shown in the snippet below:
If your Lotame URLs follow the HTTP protocol, you need to allow ClearTextTraffic
for your app. To do so, add android:usesCleartextTraffic="true"
in the <application>
tag of your app's Android Manifest
file. After adding this, the file should look like the following:
Open the Podfile
of your project and add the following line
followed by
Finally change the SDK initialization with the following
For each identify
call, RudderStack will sync the DSP Pixels provided by you in the DSP URL Settings, in the destination configuration settings. As DSP Pixels need to be synced for every user only once in 7 days, RudderStack will sync the DSP Pixels in every identify
call and if the same user remains active after 7 days, it syncs the same DSP Pixels in subsequent page
calls once in every 7 days.
A sample identify
call is as shown in the code snippet below:
The above identify call will sync the DSP Pixel, modify the template to place the userId
in the source URL where required, and use it as {{userId}}
in the template, as shown:
RudderStack will replace the {{userId}}
expression with the userId
provided in the identify
call. We will also replace {{random}}
with a random value. The rest of the expression's values ({{clientId}}
, {{clientIdSpace}}
) are to be provided in the mapping fields section, i.e. Map all the fields section in the Destination Settings, as covered in the Getting Started section.
If you mention userId
in the URL template in the Destination Settings, RudderStack replaces it the with the ID from the identify
call.
RudderStack also replaces the value of the {{random}}
expression with a random integer.
For each page
call, RudderStack will load the BCP Pixels. A page
call with a payload having userId
triggers the syncing of DSP Pixels once in every 7 days too. So, a page call serves the purpose of loading BCP Pixels and syncing DSP Pixels.
A sample page
call is as shown:
For each screen
call, RudderStack will send GET
requests for BCP Pixels. A screen
call with a payload having userId
triggers the syncing of DSP Pixels once in every 7 days too. So, ascreen
call serves the purpose of sending requests for BCP Pixels and syncing DSP Pixels.
A sample screen
call is as shown:
To get a track of every sync Pixel call (once in every 7 days), you may register a function that will be executed when the syncing of DSP Pixels takes place from the SDK.
Web Android iOS Use the web SDK ready
A PI to register the callback. We execute the function provided in LOTAME_SYNCH_CALLBACK
window object after calling the sync pixels.
An example of the above is as shown:
The above callback triggers a call to RudderStack SDK's track
API which dumps the track
call payload to a configured S3 destination in your RudderStack dashboard, each time the syncing of the DSP Pixels happens.
Use the onIntegrationReady
method to register the onSync
callback (which will be called every time the DSP URLs are synced). You'll get notified for all the sync pixels through this callback. You'll receive the type of the pixel and the final compiled URL through the callback.
Register your callback to get notified when the pixel has been synced
Syncing of DSP Pixels happens in each identify
call, and once in 7 days for page
calls having userId
in payload. RudderStack stores the sync timestamp in storage. So, in every page
call for web and in every screen
call for mobile platform, RudderStack checks for the identified user (i.e. payload having userId
) and the last syncing timestamp. If it is before 7 days or more, RudderStack automatically triggers the syncing.
You can validate the Pixels in two ways on Mobile devices.
You can register a Sync Callback with rudderClient
and you'll get the type of the pixel which is getting fired along with the compiled URL with values replaced. We replace the userId
and advertisingId
automatically. For other values, you can use the settings on the dashboard.
You can turn on DEBUG
log in your rudderClient
initialization. It'll also set the DEBUG
logging in Lotame implementation. And you can check logs generated by the SDK. It'll help you to understand the steps taken by the SDK.
If you come across any issues while configuring Lotame with RudderStack, please feel free to contact us. You can also start a conversation in our Slack community; we will be happy to talk to you!