Audience Activation

The Audience Activation extension lets you activate Real-Time CDP audiences in Adobe Commerce to create unique offers in the cart. These offers and incentives include common ecommerce merchandising techniques, such as buy 2 get 1 free, hero banners geared toward that customer, and modified product pricing through various offers. The audiences built within Real-Time CDP are based on data from various enterprise systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), point of sale, and marketing systems. Because customer segment information is constantly refreshed, customers can become associated and disassociated from a segment as they shop in your store.

You can activate audiences in a Luma storefront or headless storefront. In a Luma storefront, audience information (segment membership) is stored in a cookie on the Commerce side. In a headless storefront, audience information is passed in the GraphQL API header as a parameter named: aep-segments-membership.

Release notes

This section contains information about updates to the Audience Activation extension and includes:

New - New features
Fix - Fixes and improvements
Bug - Known issues

See Upcoming Releases to learn about release schedules and support.

See the developer documentation to learn about product compatibility.

Supported service updates

These release notes describe feature changes and fixes related to extensions used by Audience Activation.

Supported service updates

August 15, 2023

Fix - Updated the Real-Time CDP Audiences dashboard to simplify filtering.

June 27, 2023

Fix - Added support for PHP 8.2 in the magento/module-data-services-graphql package.

May 30, 2023

New - Updated the Real-Time CDP Audiences dashboard to include the ability to sort, search, and filter the active audiences within your Adobe Commerce instance.

2.2.0-beta1

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

February 16, 2024

New - If you are participating in the beta, make sure your composer.json file has the following on the root level: "minimum-stability": "beta".
New - (Beta) Added ability to create related product rules informed by audiences.

2.1.0

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

January 24, 2024

New - Updated the Real-Time CDP Audiences dashboard to include the websites that contain the audiences and specify which dynamic blocks and cart price rules are configured to use those audiences.

2.0.1

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

November 16, 2023

Fix - Improved stability.

2.0.0

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

October 10, 2023

New - Added support for OAuth 2.0 when you configure the Audience Activation extension.
Fix - Improved stability.

1.2.0

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

August 15, 2023

Fix - Updated the UI components version.

1.1.0

May 30, 2023

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

New - Added support for dynamic blocks in a headless storefront.

1.0.1

May 11, 2023

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

Fix - Fixed an issue where a dynamic block or cart price rule was not applied to the storefront.
Fix - Fixed an issue where an unconfigured installation of the Audience Activation extension caused an error when a merchant tried to create or update a dynamic block.

1.0.0

March 31, 2023

Compatibility
Compatibility

Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer

New - General availability release

Implementation

The following tasks apply to both Luma and headless storefront implementations. To activate audiences in Adobe Commerce, you must:

  • Install Adobe Commerce version 2.4.4 or higher
  • Activate Adobe Commerce as a destination in Real-Time CDP
  • Install the Audience Activation extension in the Admin
  • Configure the Audience Activation extension in the Admin

Install the extension

Install the Audience Activation extension from the marketplace, or run the following command:

composer require magento/audiences

Configure the extension

After you install the Audience Activation extension, you must log into your Commerce Admin and complete the following:

  1. On the Admin sidebar, go to System > Services > Commerce Services Connector.

  2. Sign in to your Adobe account and select your organization ID.

  3. On the Admin sidebar, go to System > Services > Data Connection.

  4. In the Datastream ID field, paste the ID of the datastream that you created when you activated Adobe Commerce as a destination in Real-Time CDP.

    This datastream sends data from your Commerce website to Real-Time CDP to determine if a shopper belongs to an audience. If you have not yet created a datastream, create one in Experience Platform, add it to the Commerce destination in Real-Time CDP, and to the Data Connection extension in the Admin.

    note note
    NOTE
    When you specify a datastream ID, you associate it to a specific website in the Data Connection extension. If your Commerce store has multiple websites, create a destination for each website in Real-Time CDP and use a different datastream ID for each.
  5. On the Admin sidebar, go to Stores > Settings > Configuration.

  6. Expand Services and select Data Connection.

  7. Add service account and credential details.

Where to use Real-Time CDP audiences in Commerce

With the Audience Activation extension enabled, you can:

Real-Time CDP audiences dashboard

You can view all active audiences that are available to personalize within your Adobe Commerce instance using the Real-Time CDP Audiences dashboard.

To access the Real-Time CDP Audiences dashboard, go to the Admin sidebar, then go to Customers > Real-time CDP Audience.

w-700 modal-image
Real-Time CDP Audiences Dashboard

The dashboard contains the following fields:

Column
Description
Hide filters
Lets you show or hide any filters that you can apply to the dashboard. Currently, the only filter you can apply is Last updated. This filter lets you select a date range for audiences based on when they were last updated.
Search
Lets you search for active audiences in your Commerce instance.
Name
Name given to the audience in Real-Time CDP.
Origin
Indicates where the audience came from, such as Experience Platform.
Websites
Indicates which websites are configured to use the audiences.
Dynamic Blocks
Indicates which dynamic blocks are configured to use the audiences.
Cart Price Rules
Indicates which cart price rules are configured to use the audiences.
Last updated
Indicates when the audience was modified in Real-Time CDP.
Sync now
Retrieves new or updated audiences from Real-Time CDP.
Customize table
Lets you show or hide the Origin, Websites, Dynamic Blocks, Cart Price Rules, and Last updated columns.

Headless support

You can activate audiences in a headless Adobe Commerce instance, such as AEM and PWA, to display cart price rules, related product rules, or dynamic blocks based on the audiences.

For cart price rules and related product rules, a headless storefront communicates to the Experience Platform through the Commerce Integration Framework (CIF). The framework provides a server-side API that is implemented using GraphQL. Audience information, such as a shopper’s segment, passes to Commerce through a GraphQL header parameter named: aep-segments-membership.

The overall architecture is as follows:

w-700 modal-image
Sending Data from Headless Storefront to Backend

After you install and configure the extension, the Experience Platform Web SDK contains the audience information in the form of segment membership.

To capture those segment memberships from the SDK, see this code snippet.

After it is retrieved, you can pass those segments to Commerce within the GraphQL header. For example:

curl 'http://magento.config/graphql' -H 'Authorization: Bearer abc123' -H 'aep-segments-membership: urlencoded_list_of_segments' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-binary '{"query":"query {\ncustomer {\nfirstname\nlastname\nemail\n}\n}"}'

Dynamic blocks

For dynamic blocks, GraphQL dynamicBlocks queries can contain the audience_id input attribute. If you specify one or more audience_id values in a dynamicBlocks query, it returns a list of dynamic blocks assigned to those audiences.

Example usage

The following query returns all dynamic blocks associated with multiple audience IDs.

Request:

{
  dynamicBlocks(input:
  {
    type: SPECIFIED
    audience_id: {
      in: [
        "cd29a789-9be8-40ad-a1ef-640c33b3742e"
        "92c3e14d-c72b-40d0-96b7-b96801dcc135"
      ]
    }
  })
  {
    items {
      uid
      audience_id
      content {
        html
      }
    }
    page_info {
      current_page
      page_size
      total_pages
    }
    total_count
  }
}

Response:

{
  "data": {
    "dynamicBlocks": {
      "items": [
        {
          "uid": "MQ==",
          "audience_id": [
            "cd29a789-9be8-40ad-a1ef-640c33b3742e"
          ],
          "content": {
            "html": "<h2><strong>SAVE 20%</strong></h2>\r\n<p>(some restrictions apply)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>"
          }
        },
        {
          "uid": "Mg==",
          "audience_id": [
            "cd29a789-9be8-40ad-a1ef-640c33b3742e",
            "92c3e14d-c72b-40d0-96b7-b96801dcc135"
          ],
          "content": {
            "html": "<p><img src=\"{{media url=&quot;wysiwyg/save20.png&quot;}}\" alt=\"save 20% red\"></p>"
          }
        }
      ],
      "page_info": {
        "current_page": 1,
        "page_size": 20,
        "total_pages": 1
      },
      "total_count": 2
    }
  }
}

Learn more about the dynamicBlocks GraphQL query in the developer documentation.

Retrieve audiences using the Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK

Before you can retrieve Real-Time CDP audiences using the Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK, you must install and configure the SDK for your mobile Commerce site.

IMPORTANT
The Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK for iOS supports iOS 11 or later.

After you complete the configuration, use mobile SDK operations to retrieve the audience data. For example:

Edge.sendEvent(experienceEvent: experienceEvent) { (handles: [EdgeEventHandle]) in
    for handle in handles {
        if handle.type == "activation:pull" {
        let payloadItems = handle.payload ?? []
            for payloadItem in payloadItems {
                if let segments = payloadItem["segments"] as? any Sequence {
                    var segmentsArr = [Any]()
                    for segment in segments {
                        let response = segment as AnyObject?
                        segmentsArr.append(response?.object(forKey: "id")! ?? "")
                    }
                    print("Saving segments ->  \(segments)")
                    storage.set(segmentsArr, forKey: "segments")
                    print("End saving segments")
                }

                // Show segments
                let rSegments = storage.object(forKey: "segments") ?? nil;
                print("Retrieving segments -> \(rSegments)")
            }
        }
    }
}

After data is retrieved, you can use it to create audience-informed cart price rules, dynamic blocks and related product rules in the Commerce app.

Audiences are not displayed in Commerce

If Real-Time CDP audiences are not being displayed in Commerce, it could be due to:

  • Incorrect authentication type selected in the Data Connection configuration page
  • Insufficient privileges on generated token

The following two sections describe how to troubleshoot either case.

Incorrect authentication type selected in configuration

  1. Open your Commerce instance.
  2. On the Admin sidebar, go to Stores > Settings > Configuration.
  3. Expand Services and select Data Connection.
  4. Ensure the server-to-server authorization method that you specified in the Authentication Type field is correct. Adobe recommends using OAuth. JWT has been deprecated. Learn more.

Insufficient privileges on generated token

This issue can be caused by insufficient API privileges for the generated token. To ensure the token has correct privileges:

  1. Identify the systems administrator for Adobe Experience Platform in your organization.
  2. Find the project and credentials that you will be using.
  3. Identify the technical account email, for example: fe3c9476-1234-1234-abcd-2a51a785009a@techacct.adobe.com.
  4. Have the systems administrator launch Adobe Experience Platform and go to Permissions -> Users -> API credentials.
  5. Using the technical account email from above, search for the credentials to modify.
  6. Open the credentials, then select Roles -> Add roles.
  7. Add Production all access.
  8. Click Save.
  9. Regenerate the access token in Console.
  10. Verify that token provides a valid response using the Target Connections API.
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