Adobe Experience Platform

#colinr75422720 · 10/21/21

Authors: Jaemi Braemner (#Jaemi_Bremner), Colin Ratcliff (#colinr75422720), and Rameen Taheri (#RameenT).

If you’ve been reading our previous blog posts around how to prepare for the new Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK and the general benefits of the library, you probably have more questions around how this new library will impact each of Adobe’s SaaS products.

For this article, we are going to dig a bit deeper and address what potential changes you can expect to see from the Adobe Target platform.

What’s the immediate impact on Adobe Target when served through the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK?

First off, as you probably know by now, the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK will be a unified library, which means there will no longer be a need to call AT.js. All calls will return faster, and as a single packet — drastically lowering load time and browser load.

This abstracts Adobe Target calls allowing for a single code source, meaning cleaner, simpler, more efficient implementations. This unified approach is tailored to provide significant benefits to resolving some common frustrations you might see with your Adobe Target implementation.

For example, we will no longer suffer some of these common Adobe Target-specific headaches:

When looking to execute test A, but your Target library currently does not exist on a specific page or a page event (e.g. form-submission) that is not currently part of your Adobe Target implementation
When utilizing A4T reporting, your primary success metric was not part of your organization’s Adobe Analytics implementation or was removed at some point
When comparing reporting coming out of AA vs AT you see a large discrepancy sounding alarms internally

The above scenarios can be extremely frustrating for an Adobe Target practitioner as addressing the above scenarios will require IT resources to resolve to delay your optimization and/ or personalization efforts. Deploying Adobe Target through Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK will effectively make these pain-points a thing of the past.

On top of these benefits, with all Adobe Experience Cloud solution calls happening in one single call we no longer have to worry about timing issues or the firing of each library in the correct order to allow Adobe Target to leverage certain audience data. This also ensures complete accuracy between Analytics and Target reporting because all data is now stored on the same platform. Additionally, we will see a significant reduction in delays when sharing Experience Cloud segments to Adobe Target from Adobe Analytics.

It is also worth calling out that “first-page personalization” when leveraging Adobe Audience Manager segments becomes possible. Because we are co-locating all services our solutions now execute seamlessly which will eliminate the need for taking extra precautions to mitigate visitors from not qualifying for segments until the following page-load.

All of this combines to make Adobe Target a much more unified and strongly integrated tool with the rest of Adobe Experience Cloud. It strengthens the ability to shift completely to leveraging Audience Manager to build enhanced audiences and Adobe Analytics for reporting without any inconsistencies.

We do want to call out, however, that if you are looking to migrate to Adobe Target today it will require that all parameters used to create audiences for existing activities will need to be converted to the Adobe Experience Platform Experience Data Model (XDM) schema format.

What stays the same?

The release of Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK is going to revolutionize how Adobe Experience Cloud solutions operate and interact with each other. However, connecting every solution to the Adobe Experience Platform platform services will come in phases and so the changes to Adobe Target will not be immediate.

Here are some areas of the Adobe Target platform that will remain the same even if you migrate to Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK today:

Adobe Target Workflow: Migrating to Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK will largely not impact your implementation and leave how you interact with Adobe Target the same as you would see it today. For example, the Visual Experience Composer (VEC) will remain available as will the Form-Based Composer to author your Target activities.
Target Profile Collection: You will continue to send customer profile data to Adobe Target via profile parameters. While some efficiencies are added above with Target’s closer integration with the other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions (such as Adobe Audience Manager), your day to day within Adobe Target will be the same — just that some things will work better and be easier.
Data Collection: For those of you reading this with concern, rest assured that you will not be required to move to Adobe Experience Platform right now. Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK is the key to sending data to Adobe Experience Platform but currently, you can still configure your implementation to route data to Adobe Target (or Adobe Analytics if using A4T) and you can retain the same type of data collection that you would have if you were

What is coming?

There is a lot to be excited about when it comes to the future of Adobe Target. As we alluded to earlier, a lot is still under development and “under wraps” regarding how our Adobe SaaS products connect to the broader Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem so what we can announce is limited. However, it is safe to announce that Adobe Target will eventually be a beneficiary of the Adobe Experience Platform Unified Profile service…and that has us chomping at the bit.

As an Adobe Target practitioner, it is no secret that executing on your ever-maturing personalization or A/B testing strategy requires that you create sophisticated audiences. Those rich audiences become paramount for providing customers the experience they expect in today’s digital age.

That said, Adobe Target does a great job of meeting this requirement through its own profile management system but ensuring a unified customer experience is becoming more complex and leveraging cross-platform data is becoming paramount in providing that “connected” experience.

Figure 1: Once the first phase of the connection between the Unified Profile service and Adobe Target is complete, Target users will have the ability to create activities that leverage Adobe Experience Platform segments, lifting your personalization and optimization efforts to the next level.

As the Unified Profile and Adobe Target connection make the jump from an upcoming feature and into reality, we will be sure to publish additional blog content to bring as much detail on what is available front and center.

When should I migrate?

As a Target customer, we want to make sure that you migrate to Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK when you will get the most benefit. Each client implementation is different with varying levels of complexity and so the best way to ensure that you are choosing the right time is to talk with your Adobe Account team.

However, here is a general guideline of how we would recommend you proceed:

Adobe Target Users without other Adobe SaaS products

If Target is your only tool, it is safe to hold until the future benefits of Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK become more apparent. Currently, the strong advantages all circle around integrations with our other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, so you would not reap any strong benefits at the moment — though if you are planning on expanding to other solutions, this is an opportunity to build solid groundwork.

Multi-Solution Users

Now would be a great time to consider shifting only when the additional steps to set up Target is acceptable. It is an opportunity to begin building the architecture and get solid benefits now, while also having a strong groundwork when future benefits come into play. As a reminder, shifting to Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK does require the move to deploying XDM so consider this as part of the overall shift. Additionally, a couple of things to call out before using Target on Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK:

You must use our Adobe Target VEC Helper Chrome Extension to use the VEC to create your personalization activities.
If you are using audiences with user profile (profile.*) and/or custom parameters in your activities, you must re-create those audiences to use XDM instead. Thereafter, make sure to relaunch your activities using those re-created audiences to be delivered on your pages.

Final thoughts

This is an extremely exciting time for the entire Experience Cloud — a huge step forward in delivering a unified solution that delivers above and beyond benefits, particularly in conjunction with each other. We’re extremely excited about the new capabilities, but particularly for the ability to leverage these deeper integrations to create even more robust tools. The more all these solutions work together, the more power each has.

Follow the Adobe Experience Platform Community Blog for more developer stories and resources, and check out Adobe Developers on Twitter for the latest news and developer products. Sign up here for future Adobe Experience Platform Meetup.

References

Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK — https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/experience-platform/edge/home.html
Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions (SaaS) — https://business.adobe.com/
Adobe Target — https://www.adobe.com/marketing/target.html
Adobe Experience Cloud — https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud.html
Adobe Analytics — https://www.adobe.com/analytics/adobe-analytics.html
Adobe Audience Manager — https://www.adobe.com/analytics/audience-manager.html
Adobe Experience Platform Experience Data Model (XDM) — https://www.adobe.io/open/standards/xdm.html
Simplifying Customer Workflows with Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK – https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-platform-blogs/simplifying-custom...
Adobe Target Visual Experience Composer — https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/experiences/vec/visual-experience-composer.html
Adobe Target Form-Based Composer — https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/experiences/form-experience-composer.html
Adobe Experience Platform — https://www.adobe.com/experience-platform.html

Originally published: Jun 25, 2020

Adobe Experience Platform