Read this page to understand the different types and categories of Adobe Experience Platform destinations.
In Adobe Experience Platform, we distinguish between two destination types - connections and extensions. There are two types of connection destinations, Profile Export destinations and Segment Export destinations.
Profile Export, Streaming Segment Export, and Edge Personalization destinations in Adobe Experience Platform capture event data, combine it with other data sources to form the Real-time Customer Profile, apply segmentation, and export segments and qualified profiles to destinations.
Profile export destinations receive raw data, often with email address as the primary key. Experience Platform currently supports two types of profile export destinations:
Enterprise destinations, or streaming profile export destinations, are available to Real-Time Customer Data Platform Ultimate customers only.
Use enterprise destination data connectors to deliver Real-time Customer Data Platform profiles in near real-time to internal systems or to other third-party systems for data synchronization, analysis, and further profile enrichment use cases.
These destinations receive segment and profile data as Experience Platform data streams.
Enterprise destinations include:
File-based destinations receive .csv
files containing profiles and/or attributes. Amazon S3 is an example of a destination where you can export files containing profile exports.
Segment export destinations receive Experience Platform segment data. These destinations use segment IDs or user IDs. Advertising and social destinations like Google Display & Video 360, Google Ads, or Facebook are examples of such destinations.
Edge personalization destinations in Experience Platform include Adobe Target and the Custom personalization destination. By using these destinations, you can enable same-page and next-page personalization use cases for your customers.
Read more about how to configure personalization destinations for same-page and next-page personalization.
The video below runs you through the particularities of the two types of destinations:
Platform leverages the power and flexibility of tag management, allowing you to configure tag extensions in the Data Collection UI.
For detailed information about tag extensions, including use cases and how to find them in the interface, see the tag extensions overview.
Tag extensions forward raw event data to several types of destinations. Think of extensions as an Event Forwarding type of destination. This is a simpler type of integration with destination platforms, which only forwards raw event data. Examples of those are the Gainsight personalization extension or the Confirmit Voice of the Customer extension.
As a marketer, you could use a combination of connections and extensions to address your use cases.
Connections are useful when it’s necessary to leverage a complete centralized customer profile or a customer segment for activation. For example, use connections if you are joining behavioral data from an analytics system with uploaded CRM data to qualify a user for a given segment before delivering a personalized message to that user.
Extensions are helpful when event data is used to trigger an action, or to conduct segmentation in an external environment. For example, if behavioral data needs to be forwarded to an external system without being joined to other data sources on file for a given user.
The connections and extensions in the destinations catalog are grouped by destination category (Advertising, Cloud storage, Survey platforms, Email marketing, etc.), depending on the marketing action that they help you achieve. For more information on each of the categories, as well as the destinations included in each category, see the Destinations catalog documentation.