AEP in the Real World: Data Modeling , Identity, Segmentation & Deployment

[Parvesh_Parmar]

Hi AEP community,

Running Adobe Experience Platform at scale is exciting — but often harder than the demos suggest. From broken identities to segmentation limits, teams in banking, retail, and travel keep hitting the same walls. Let’s share what’s really working (and not) in production.

Identity & Profile Stitching – brittle glue

Upstream systems creating same hash IDs for orignaal uniqe identifiers like email etc, and suddenly two customers become one (or vice versa).

How do you validate identities before they reach AEP?

Event vs. Profile – one profile, many events

Personalization often needs event-level behaviour joined with attributes (“did X three times in 7 days AND lives in Y”).

How are you modeling event vs. profile data to make this practical?

Segmentation Logic – when the UI hits limits

SQL-heavy teams often struggle to express complex business rules in PQL/Segment Builder.

Do you prototype in Query Service first, then port to Segment Builder?

Federated Audiences / Zero-Copy

Exciting, but freshness and governance issues remain.

Has zero-copy worked for you in production? What trade-offs did you hit?

Sandboxes & Migration Surprises

Stage-to-prod moves don’t always go smoothly.

Any naming/versioning practices that saved you from collisions?

 Example: In one project, we discovered that identity issue in source CRM created double profiles — validating upstream fixed 80% of stitching issues. Curious if others see the same?

 If you’ve worked with AEP in high-volume or regulated environments, what’s been your toughest operational challenge so far? Even a short answer can spark new ideas.

Thanks for sharing!

Parvesh Parmar

Adobe Experience Platform Community Captain

https://www.linkedin.com/in/parvesh-parmar/

[jarrell43]

We’ve run into some of these same challenges. On the identity side, a lot of our stitching problems came from the web/CRM connection. We’ve got multiple Marketo instances and CRMs pushing into AEP, so duplicates were almost guaranteed. Tightening up ECID capture and making sure form IDs were consistent in the SDR helped a lot before data ever landed in AEP. Not perfect, but it cut down some of the mess. 

On event vs. profile, we've tested the logic in Adobe Analytics first. Things like “3 form fills in 7 days” or repeat visits. If it holds up in Workspace and the marketers are happy with it, then it moves over into CDP. It saved a lot of back and forth later on a few requests.

Also curious how others are handling the balance; especially when segments get too complex for business users to build directly in Segment Builder.

[Parvesh_Parmar]

@jarrell43  Thank you for sharing it.