Destinations overview

Destinations overview banner

Destinations are pre-built integrations with destination platforms that allow for the seamless activation of data from Adobe Experience Platform. You can use destinations to activate your known and unknown data for cross-channel marketing campaigns, email campaigns, targeted advertising, and many other use cases.

Destinations and sources

One of the core functionalities of Platform is ingesting your first-party data and activating it for your business needs. Use sources to ingest data into Platform and destinations to export data from Platform.

Destinations steps

  • Choose from a self-service catalog of all the destinations available in Platform.
  • Use destinations to send profiles or audiences to marketing automation platforms, digital advertising platforms, and more.
  • Schedule data exports to your preferred destinations at regular times.

Controls

The controls in the destinations workspace allow you to:

  • Browse the catalog of destination platforms where you can activate your data;
  • Create, edit, activate, and disable data flows to the destinations in the catalog;
  • Create an account in a storage location or link Platform to the account in the destination platform;
  • Select which audiences should be activated to destinations;
  • Select which Experience Data Model (XDM) fields to export when activating audiences to email marketing destinations.

Destination types and categories

With Experience Platform, you can activate data to various types of destinations, to satisfy your activation use cases. Destinations range from API-based integrations, to integrations with file reception systems, profile lookup destinations, and more. For detailed information about all available destinations, see the destination types and categories overview.

Adobe-built and partner-built destinations

Some of the connectors in the Experience Platform destinations catalog are built and maintained by Adobe, while others are built and maintained by partner companies using Destination SDK. A note at the top of the documentation page for each partner-built connector calls out if a destination is created and maintained by the partner. For example, the Amazon S3 connector is created by Adobe, while the TikTok connector is created and maintained by the TikTok team.

For partner-authored and maintained connectors, this means that issues with the connector might need to be resolved by the partner team (contact method provided in the note in the documentation page). For issues with Adobe-authored and maintained connectors, contact your Adobe representative or Customer Care.

Destinations and access controls

The destinations functionality in Platform works with Adobe Experience Platform access control permissions. Depending on your user’s permission level, you can view, manage, and activate destinations. For information about the individual permissions, see Access control in Adobe Experience Platform and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

The following table outlines the permissions and permission combinations required to perform certain actions on destinations:

Permission level Description
Manage Destinations To connect to destinations, you need the Manage Destinations access control permission.
Manage Destinations, Activate Destinations, View Profiles, and View Segments To activate audiences to destinations and enable the mapping step of the workflow, you need the Manage Destinations, Activate Destinations, View Profiles, and View Segments access control permissions.
Manage Destinations, Activate Segments without Mapping, View Profiles, and View Segments To activate audiences to destinations and hide the mapping step of the workflow, you need the Manage Destinations, Activate Segments without Mapping, View Profiles, and View Segments access control permissions.
View Identity Graph To export identities to destinations, you need the View Identity Graph access control permission.
Select identity namespace highlighted in the workflow to activate audiences to destinations.

For more information about access controls, see the Access control user guide.

Attribute-based access control for destinations

Attribute-based access control in Adobe Experience Platform allows administrators to control access to specific objects and/or capabilities based on attributes.

With attribute-based access control, you can apply mapping configurations to fields that you have permissions to. Furthermore, you cannot export data to a destination if you do not have access to all fields in the dataset.

For more information on how destinations work with attribute-based access controls, read the attribute-based access control overview.

Destinations monitoring

After establishing a connection to a destination and completing the activation workflow, you can monitor the data exports to your reception system. Read the guide on monitoring dataflows to destinations in the UI for more information.

You can also validate if data is coming through successfully to your destination. Most destination documentation pages in the catalog have a Validate data export section, which indicates how you can check in the destination platform that data is being successfully brought in from Experience Platform.

Data Governance restrictions on activating data to destinations

Data governance is enforced for Platform destinations through:

  • Marketing actions that you can select in the create destinations workflow;
  • Data usage policies that restrict data containing certain usage labels from being activated to destinations with certain marketing actions.

See the Data Governance in Platform documentation for more information about marketing actions and resolving data policy violations.

For more information about selecting marketing actions in the create destination workflow, see the following pages for the different destination types in Platform:

For more information about data policy violations in the audience activation workflow, see the Review step in the following guides:

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