In this video, we’ll go over the concepts of identity and identity graphs in Adobe Experience Platform. A big challenge in making great customer experiences is making them seamless across channels and devices. The average customer may have over a dozen touch points with your brand before a conversion even takes place. They may browse your website, open your mobile app, visit your brick and mortar store, and so on. Understanding where a single customer is in their journey is complicated as each touch point often uses its own unique identity. Furthermore, data associated with these identities gets siloed in enterprise systems, such as CRM, ERP, DMP, CMS, and marketing automation. These disconnected identities are a barrier to achieving a holistic view of the customer in order to serve the next best experience. Active management of identities via linking, resolving, governing, and actioning is time-consuming, process-heavy, and difficult. Fortunately, Experience Platform provides a rich set of identity resolution capabilities which are built from the ground up to handle these tasks. For each customer that interacts with your brand, Platform can link their disconnected identities into a versatile identity graph creating a single, holistic representation of each individual person. Experience Platform has three key identity resolution capabilities, identity collection, identity graphs, and the Identity Service API. Identity Collection happens whenever you ingest data into Experience Platform, either through batch ingestion, streaming ingestion, or a source connection. All data that is ingested into Platform must conform to a predefined experience data model schema. When developing your data model and defining your schemas, any fields that contain identity information should be marked as identity fields. This is how Platform is able to recognize identity information whenever new data is ingested under these schemas. The second major capability is the Identity Graph. Identity Graphs are maps of relationships between individual identities, and Identity Graph for a single individual can contain their email address, CRM IDs, device IDs, and more. While the contents of each individual Identity Graph will naturally vary between customers, the structure of how these identities relate to one another remains consistent. Experience Platform maintains a complete representation of the identity relationships that have been built based on your data. This representation is referred to as the Private Graph, and is visible only to your organization. The third major capability is the Identity Service API. Experience Platform’s identity capabilities are exposed through Adobe I.O., so developers can use the same API endpoints as the Experience Platform user interface. Using the Identity Service API, you can programmatically interact with your Platform Identity Graphs from your experience application. Let’s talk more about Identity Graphs. An Identity Graph is constructed by discovering relationships between identities among your customer experience data using deterministic algorithms. The deterministic algorithms establish relationships between identities based on your own observations. For example, when a visitor lands on your website, they’re assigned an anonymous visitor ID. If they log in using their account ID, that account ID can now be deterministically linked to the anonymous one. Identity Graphs are a key piece for creating a merged view of a customer in real-time customer profile. See the profile documentation to learn how to combine Identity Graphs and Merge Rules to stitch together a complete representation of each individual customer. Identity Graphs also extend Adobe’s commitment to privacy. Adobe, as a data processor, has launched Experience Platform services that allow you to label your data based on data usage policies and enforce those policies as potentially sensitive identity information moves through the system. See the documentation on Adobe Experience Platform data governance for more information. You’ve now been introduced to the major capabilities provided by Identity Service. To learn more, please review the official Identity Service documentation. Thanks for listening, and good luck building out your own Identity Graphs to power your personalization capabilities.
