How leading enterprises turn technology investments into 2026 State of Digital Experience Analytics Most Fortune 1ooo companies have digital experience technologyFew are getting full value from it. Picture your marketing team's tech stack. Tag management? Check. Consent management? Live.Analytics? Deployed. You've invested in digital experience. Your platforms are best-in-class. But here's what we're hearing from marketing leaders: the technology works. The architecturedoesn't. Five years ago, when we published our last State of Digital report, the challenge was adoption.Today, adoption is table stakes. The new issue is seeing ROl. We scanned the websites of the Fortune 1ooo to understand what digital experience analyticsinfrastructure looks like now. What we found: leading companies are taking a different approach.They're stepping back to evaluate their stacks. They're investing in unified data foundations that lettheir platforms deliver. The organizations that assess and optimize their architecture now to support privacy requirements,Al capabilities, and real-time personalization will compound their advantage. This report shows you where to focus next. Leading organizations arefixing their architecture nowbefore Al widens the gap. Contents Build the Foundation First04 Layer Your Measurement Capabilities60 Make Optimization Continuous16 Prepare for Al Acceleration19 Develop Your Playbook20 Build the Foundation First Governed data is usable data. Before you can analyze, optimize, or activate digital experience data, you need the infrastructure tocollect it properly. Think back five years. Privacy platforms were niche investments. Tag management wasinconsistent, often lacking enterprise-wide standards. The mindset was "collect first, govern later." That approach is over. Regulatory enforcement has accelerated. State-level privacy laws have created a compliancepatchwork across the United States. Consumers expect privacy and control, enforcing theirpreferencesthroughadblockersandprivacy-focusedbrowsers. Data collection governance is now your foundational layer. It determines whether your marketingteam runs on clean, compliant, usable data, or spends their time fixing it. The companies that built this foundation right are moving faster now.The ones that didn't areplaying catch-up while managing risk Tag Management Tag management has reached maturity. Tag management sits at the center of your digital experience infrastructure as the layer that makestracking, measurement, and experimentation possible. Get it right, and your teams drive outcomes.Get it wrong, and they spend theirtime wrangling data. Having a client-side tag management system (TMS) is the norm today. Not having one is theexception. But deployment doesn't equal thoughtful architecture. And that gap is what separatescompanies getting value from their platforms from those struggling. Google Tag Manager commands the market. Among companies using tag management, Google Tag Manager (GTM) dominates. Client-side GTMis deployed by more than seven out of ten companies in the Fortune 10oo and commands 89%market share among TMs users. Adobe Tags is a distant second but is popular with companies thathave invested in the wider Adobe stack. Whyhas GTMgrownsofast?Threereasons. It's free, eliminating budget as abarrier. The interface has matured, makingit accessible to marketing teams withoutdeep technical resources. And it integratesseamlessly with Google's analytics andadvertising ecosystem,both marketleaders Adobe Tags adoption skews toward theFortune 50 and companies deeplycommitted to Adobe Experience Cloud,where native integrations create meaningfulworkflow advantages. One in four companies runs multiple tag managers Most companies use Google Tag Manager exclusively. But almost a quarter now run multiple TMsplatforms,most commonlyGTMalongsideAdobeTags.Thisreflectspractical reality.Organizationswith investments in both Google and Adobe ecosystems often find it more efficient to run both thantoforceconsolidation. The key? Ensuring both systems feed from a common data layer. Architecture turns a container into infrastructure. Having tag management deployed and having it architected properly are very different things. Theorganizations extracting real value from their TMs share common characteristics: an event-drivensemantic data layerthatfeeds all platforms with consistent definitions,clear governancearoundwhatgets deployed and bywhom,andtightintegrationwith consentmanagement.Forthesecompanies, tag management is orchestration infrastructure, not just a tag container. ASSESSYOURARCHITECTURE Is your data layer structured to support Al-driven personalization and decisioning?Are you confident your tags respect visitor consent choices?Are there tags that are still sending data to vendors you no longer work with?Does your organization have strong governance in place to ensure your datafoundationsevolvewithyourorganizationas itgrows