Persistance of PCID and offline data

[chrisc86557942]

Hello experts!

According to the Adobe Target Classroom book, PCID profile data is cleared/reset in a maximum of 84 days.

Does this mean that I cannot connect two sessions of web activity that happen 4 months apart to the same person? ie is the PCID cleared, or just the profile data for that ID?

If the latter, this will be a nightmare for Master Data Management, and maintaining a Single Customer View, unless I'm missing something?

Thanks, Chris.

Marketing consultant, UK.

[bhawkins]

Hi Chris, 

The PCID does get reset after 84 days of inactivity which is more than enough for testing and analyzing results.  Adobe Target is designed to be your Enterprise Testing solution, not so much a CRM or a Master Data Management platform.  

That said, you have many ways showing different experiences to your visitors via Adobe Target by way of the Single Customer View.  Depending on the scenario or desired setup, you can leverage Adobe Target APIs or Adobe Target plug-ins to get data into your CRM or system of record.  You can also use the same tools to get data from the CRM into Adobe Target.  

Take care, 

Brian 

[chrisc86557942]

Hi Brian (or Jon?!? - the wonders of individual identification online, made flesh in your reply!)

Thanks for clarifying that.

So if I understand what you're saying correctly, if I want to maintain a persistent/historic view of an individual customer across multiple sessions, that I can associate with offline marketing data (value, purchases etc), I have to maintain my own cookie-based unique ID, and pass the historic browse history into T&T through API/Mbox via this ID, rather than rely on the (at first blush more effective/elegant) solution of letting Adobe manage it. Since most of my customers visit 1-3 times a year, but come back year on year, this would seem to be the only workable solution.

Appreciate any further light you can shed on this.

Thanks, Chris.

[bhawkins]

Hi Chris, 

Yea, it is Brian and for the life of me, I can't figure out how the name Jon Michaels got associated with my Adobe ID.  I've tried changing it and the change is in effect in other places but this forum still thinks I am Jon Michaels whoever that is.  :-/

Typically organizations don't have tests that span over many months of visitor inactivity but the scenario comes up every now and then.  Depending on exactly what you are hoping to do and what are the pieces of data at your disposal, there are many options.  

If the data you have is available at the presentation layer then you can simply pass this data as part of the mbox call - this is a very popular approach.  You could also use the mboxes to read any and all other first party cookies that you have which might be a solid approach for you as well.  You can also have the offer in Adobe Target make a call to an internal system and bring that data into the presentation layer.  You also have options such as Adobe's Audience Manager or if you've migrated to Adobe's new Marketing Cloud ID, you could leverage the new uniquely shared ID across platforms that would allow you to grab historical data from SiteCatalyst.  If you have Insight running, you can have that tool push data directly to Adobe Target as well.  

So yea, lots of ways to tackle the problem which is much better than only having one or two.  I would look at the other first party cookie data that is available to see if you can leverage something from there.  I would also explore what data is available from the Data Layer and pass any/all of it to the mboxes. 

Take care, 

Brian 

[chrisc86557942]

Hi Brian

Thanks for coming back to me on this. However I think we might be at cross-purposes. My issue is not how I get offline data into T&T but rather what are my options for preserving customer identification across the 3 month watershed. Let me try to give an example:

Day 1: Cookie A browses the site and looks at a few products

Day 2: Cookie A browses the site, and registers their email address (Email A)

Day 10: a customer buys a product in store, and gives their email address: Email A

... I can now associate Cookie A with Email A, 2 lots of browse behaviour and the in store purchase - I'll define them all as belonging to as Customer A

Day 100: Cookie A browses the site: I want to serve up a cross sell offer based on their historic purchase behaviour:

1. How does T&T I know it's Customer A, and so to fetch the purchase history for Customer A from the offline marketing database?

2. How do I get their historic browse behaviour into T&T (which has thrown it away a week previous)

Thanks, Chris.

[bhawkins · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris, 

This is very helpful.  I was approaching it a different way to accomplish the same task but by loading offline data into Adobe Target.  

Can I ask how you do that association between Cookie A and EmailA?  Do you have a cookie management tool?  

Depending on what data you store in your cookie (if you have history in store and online in cookie), Adobe Target can read that on the fly to give you that targeting option.  

This cookie that you manage, if you have a unique non-PII identifier that is used as a primary key, you can map that ID to Adobe's ID.  This would then allow you to preserve that history via an offline API.

Here is some info on the mbox3rdPartyId:  https://marketing.adobe.com/developer/en_US/documentation/test-target/r-offline-conversion

Take care, 

Brian    

[chrisc86557942]

Thanks Brian

No we wouldn't be expecting to ship that kind of data around in the cookie. T&T would need to fetch it via an API call or operational CAR.

Sounds like what I want to do is possible but will require a fair bit of engineering to make it work.

Thanks for your help.

Best Regards,

Chris.