Tracking Through the Transition: A flexible Tracking Architecture for AEM Migrations

Migrating a website from one CMS to another is already complex. Migrating the analytics setup at the same time can easily create tracking gaps, broken comparability, or a long delay before reliable data becomes available again.

In this field report, we share how we migrated analytics tracking during a FirstSpirit-to-Adobe Experience Manager lift-and-shift project without losing measurement continuity. The existing implementation was based on Piwik/Matomo, while the target setup needed to support Adobe Analytics, a robust adobeDataLayer, and future Adobe Experience Platform or Customer Journey Analytics use cases.

Instead of waiting until the AEM rollout was complete, we introduced a virtual migration data layer on the existing FirstSpirit pages. This layer acted as an adapter between the old website and the future tracking architecture, allowing Adobe Analytics tracking to start while the site was still running on the legacy CMS. By normalizing the collected data across both environments, we were able to compare data before and after the migration, reduce implementation risk, and ensure that the new setup tracked not less, but more consistently and more reliably.

After the switch to AEM, the same tracking concepts continued to work seamlessly in the new environment, now backed by the native adobeDataLayer. Since the implementation was based on Adobe Web SDK from day one, the project was also prepared early for future integrations with Adobe Experience Platform and Customer Journey Analytics.

The talk will cover the architectural decisions, migration stages, implementation strategy, and lessons learned from the project. We will focus on what needs to be clarified early, how to design a flexible data layer for transitional CMS scenarios, and how teams can avoid treating analytics as an afterthought in AEM migration projects.