Multi-Lingual Personalization at Scale with Experience Fragments (AEM and Target)

[#1]

Authors: Praveen Penupati, Himanshu Pathak

AEM integrated with Adobe Target makes life easier for content creators and marketers. They both work in the tool of their choice and the integration allows them to focus on what they do best independently.

Managing personalization for a multi-lingual brand is, however, still a big challenge. Wouldn’t it be dreamy if there was a trick to centralize multi-lingual personalization?

How AEM and Target work together

By Integrating Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Target, one can harvest the power of AEM capabilities of cross channel’s content delivery, multi-language site capability and responsive behaviour, with the intelligence of Adobe Target which can be used to serve relevant content to the relevant customer.

AEM and Adobe Target combined to facilitate the right customer with the right content in right language.

Experience Fragments, created in AEM can be exported to Adobe Target as HTML or JSON. They can then be used as offers in Target activities, to test and personalize experiences at scale. By default, Experience Fragments are delivered in the HTML format. This can be used by both AEM and third party channels alike. For export to Adobe Target, HTML is used.

What you need to export AEM Experience Fragments to Target

• Integrate AEM with Target (see the References section )
• Create Experience Fragments in AEM
• Configure AEM to export the Experience Fragments to Target
• Use the Experience Fragment offers in Target activities

Limitation of standard integration for multi-lingual Enterprises

A Global Brand with multiple languages usually have language variations for an offer and would be interested in optimal way of managing a Target offer/activity at a central place.

In the standard integration they will have to export one offer per language to Target and create one activity per language in Target.

Consider a Brand with 10 languages or more and this set up becomes a maintenance night mare.

Let’s visually look at what this means.

How AEM and Target work together

By Integrating Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Target, one can harvest the power of AEM capabilities of cross channel’s content delivery, multi-language site capability and responsive behaviour, with the intelligence of Adobe Target which can be used to serve relevant content to the relevant customer.

AEM and Adobe Target combined to facilitate the right customer with the right content in right language.

What we propose — Dynamic Experience Fragment (XF) rendering

Ability to create a Target Experience Activity with Modification type ‘Custom Code’ that dynamically renders a language specific Experience Fragment from AEM (publisher) over Ajax.

AEM Set-up

• Create the XF in master language and roll out required language copies
• Publish the Experience Fragments created in AEM Author to AEM Publisher

Target setup

Let’s take a look at the steps to setup Dynamic Experience Fragment (XF).

Step 1 — Create Multi-page Activity in Adobe Target

• Create a new Target Experience activity
• In the Visual Experience Composer (VEC) click the gear icon, then select Page Delivery
• Click Add Template Rule, then specify the criteria for the pages you want to add the experience to
• Specify the page range and choose an operator

Step 2 — Create Experience Activity in Target

Add Modification type ‘Custom Code’ with below code and save the activity

Highlighted row in the image above shows fetching a locale-specific offer from AEM

Considerations

• All language websites use the same Target Workspace
• The Targeted components across pages should have similar DOM structure.
• Site and Fragment URLs should have consistent path/name patterns for Target to build the URL dynamically
• Some basic understanding of JS to update the XF URL in Target custom code

Recommendations

• Leverage the out of the box AEM MSM capability for XF translations.
• Cache the Experience Fragments via CDN/Dispatcher for better performance
• Expiry header can be set to Experience Fragments to cache them on user’s browser for optimized performance

Key benefits of this approach

• Reduce effort & maintenance as one Target activity/offer serves Personalized behaviour across multiple sites
• Marketing team works in their preferred tool of choice
• Loosely coupled as no Cloud Service Integration required between AEM and Target

References

• AEM — Reusing Content: Multi Site Manager and Live Copy
• AEM — Experience Fragments
• AEM — Integrating with Adobe Target
• Personalization using AEM Experience Fragments and Adobe Target
• AEM — Exporting Experience Fragments to Adobe Target
• Target — Include the same experience on similar pages

Originally published: Jun 29, 2021

[#2]

Very helpful stuff. Thanks @Amelia_Waliany