Developing a Real-time Data Collection and Activation Strategy

Transcript

All right, hey everyone, I think in the interest of time we’re going to get started here. And then as people trickle in late, that’s fine because we will be recording the session. So yeah, thanks Katie for hitting record. Let’s go ahead and get started. So hey everyone, I’m Ben Wallace. I’m a senior customer success architect within Adobe’s integrated architecture team. I’ll be the host for today’s session focusing on developing a real-time data collection and activation strategy. So please note that today’s session will be recorded and we will send that recording to everyone who has registered. So during the presentation today, feel free to post questions in the chat pod and I’ll be following along and answering some during the session, but we’ll also be answering the questions at the end of the session today. So yeah, at this time I’m going to go ahead and turn things over to our presenter, Bobbi Patterson. So take it away, Bobbi. Thank you, Ben. So yeah, glad to be with everyone here today. I just want to do a quick introduction. So my name is Bobbi Patterson. I’m a senior customer success manager at Adobe. I’ve been with Adobe for a little over four years. Prior to that, I was a customer for a number of years of analytics mostly, but also some of the other solutions like Target. So really excited to talk to you today about how you can use Adobe Data Collection to develop a modern data collection and activation strategy. This session will not go into technical aspects, although we do have some resources on the last slide for those of you who are interested in learning more about how to implement Adobe Data Collection, which is part of the Adobe Experience platform. So some goals for today. So we want to help you understand some of the benefits of modernizing your data collection strategy. Things have changed a lot over the last 10 years when I was kind of started as an analytics product owner and the way that we collected data and shared it with other applications. There are a lot more capabilities today, low latency capabilities that we’ll talk about. So I want to talk about some of the benefits of your strategy and why it’s important to have a strategy as opposed to just diving into the technology. That’s where we see some customers getting tripped up. So we’ll share some tips for building that strategy, things to think about. And then we also want to demystify the process for collecting data and sending it to Adobe applications as well as third party destinations. Some of it is just terminology has changed over the years. We want to help you understand that. So topics for today, we’ll talk a little bit of time on terminology just to make sure that it’s clear what the terminology and packaging is for the different tools. We’ll talk about some of the benefits of a modern data collection and activation strategy. A few things to take into consideration. We’ll introduce you to Adobe data collection if you’re not familiar with that term. We’ll go over what is all in that and how it works. We put together a few use cases to help you visualize the flow of data and understand how it ties back to your customer journeys. We have a glossary, which should be useful for understanding the terminology. And finally, a few really good resources for those of you who are interested in exploring this topic further. So with that, let’s jump in. I know the terminology can be confusing. Sometimes it feels like maybe you’re swimming with sharks. And over the years, the technology has evolved. The terminology has changed. And so we want to take a few minutes and just acknowledge the fact that there is some anxiety around the terminology. And so we’ll cover a lot of these terms along the way. I want to hit a couple of them now, and then we’ll hit the rest later. The terms that you see here in gray, we’re no longer using DTM as an older technology that has been deprecated. Many of you have heard the term launch. We now refer to that as Adobe tags. And then Alloy is a code library that we just have rebranded as Web SDK. Hopefully that will help. And at the end of this, you will feel more comfortable with the terminology. Let’s talk about some of the benefits of modernizing your data collection and activation capabilities. One of the most important ones is just improved performance. So by consolidating, we have a lighter code base now, which means faster loading pages, which translates into higher conversion in a better user experience. Heavy code running on a page, a bunch of different code libraries, that can really degrade your performance. We’ve seen up to 70% lighter code with the Adobe data collection. So that’s important for both from a maintenance standpoint as well as for your user experience. And then it has taken a lot of time in the past to implement different tag management systems, tracking pixels, integration code. And now we have vastly streamlined this to where you literally can flip a switch to share data with other Adobe applications. And we’ve started building out some quick start capabilities with third party destinations as well. As many of you are aware, cookies have a limited lifespan, third party cookies in particular. We’re not going to dive deep into that, but it is a consideration as you look at reducing your dependency on third party cookies and cookie based tags and pixels. The industry is really shifting more to persistent first party identifiers with products like real time CDP. And then finally, faster activation of data. That’s really at the end of the day, we want to enable more timely and relevant experiences to both customers and prospects across different channels. You can take advantage of some of those capabilities to build more timely experiences, personalization, faster activation across channels to meet rising customer expectations. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you build out your strategy. And I do want to emphasize that it really is important to have a data collection strategy for a couple of reasons. One is you may have different owners of technology that depends on data that you collect on your website, mobile app. There are downstream implications to think about. So a strategy and a governance model are really important before you get deep into the technology. So we’ve bucketed them into four different categories. The first one is customer experience. Take the time to map out your customer experiences, including personas, steps in the journey, what does success look like for your customer experience? Identify your KPIs. How are you measuring success at each step in those journeys? And identify where you need to share real-time signals with other applications. Not everything needs to be transmitted immediately. If you have downstream systems that can’t support server-to-server communication or operate on a daily basis, you may not need that. But then you may want that for more real-time personalization or media suppressions. We’ll talk about a few use cases there as well. The second category is architecture. And we recommend by starting with your Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, look at that footprint and think about where you need to share data and identify other applications you need to consider. For example, social media destinations such as Facebook that you might want to share data with. And then look at your existing implementation. This is a great time to do an audit of your existing data collection. I know some companies, some of the tag management capabilities have been around for a number of years. Over time, you may have accumulated quite a bit of technical debt. You may have data quality issues. Maybe there are things that are inaccurate that you don’t want to carry forward into the future. This is a great time to clean that up. You might be collecting data that you don’t need or don’t realize you’re collecting. And then do you have a data layer, which is a more industry best practice way of collecting data from a web page, for example. And then finally, take inventory of your third party tags. Look at all the stuff that’s running on your website. Is that still needed? Can it be consolidated or streamlined? What destinations are active? And maybe there are some obsolete tags running in our site that you can clean up as well. Finally, think about migrating to a new data collection strategy. You’ll want to create a cutover plan and share it with other stakeholders. If you, depending on how your organization is set up, you might have a product owner for Adobe Experience Platform. You may have different product owners for the other Adobe solutions. And know that change needs to be coordinated carefully to avoid unexpected impacts to downstream systems. So some of this is data migration strategy. Some of it is also just governance. So think about the next time that you want to collect something new from your website and what are the downstream implications of that. So it’s a great time to put in place a governance model if you don’t have that kind of change strategy in place. And then finally, just make sure that you’re avoiding duplicate data collection and that you don’t have gaps while you’re cutting over to a new strategy. So let’s shift just a little bit and talk about Adobe Experience Platform data collection. We’ll talk about the architecture of it here in a moment. But data collection is a set of tools that enable customers to collect and send event data real-time, server-side via Experience Edge Network to other Adobe products and third-party tools. This is really intended to improve the digital marketing experiences and it’s a big leap forward from the early days of tag management. So let’s talk a little bit about the architecture here. So I want to unpack this just a bit. It can be a bit overwhelming, but it is important to understand the different components and how they work together. So there are really three different tools that you can use to collect data from your applications. A Web SDK, which you would use to collect data from your website. A Mobile SDK that you can use to collect data from your, if you have a mobile application. There’s also a server-side API. And then you’ll see labels for data streams on here. Data streams are just pipes for sharing data across applications. We use a format called XDM as a standard format for sharing data across the Edge network. And so what is the Edge network? This is the topic of confusion, I think. It can be a little scary. But really, this is how we, you know, it’s really a network of Adobe servers designed for low latency data collection and distribution. This is how we collect and activate data quickly across a number of different applications. The Edge network makes it easy to integrate data you’ve collected with other experience cloud applications as well as partners such as Meta or Facebook. So what has changed with the Adobe data collection? So quite a bit, actually. In the past, you had to manage all these different code bases separately. You might have, and this is not even comprehensive. I just picked a few things as an example just to kind of explain the concept. But it actually was more complicated than this even. But just to talk through a couple of examples here. In the past, you had to manage analytics tags. If you have Adobe Target, you had that code library. If you’re using Facebook, you would have their tracking pixel in place. All these really had to be managed independently. And then if you’re an experienced platform customer, you would share that data through analytics. With the new method, we cut out a lot of that. You make one call to Adobe’s Edge network via the web SDK in this example. That goes to the Edge network. The Edge network distributes that data across the different applications that you have set up to consume it. So that can be Adobe Experience Platform if you’re using real-time CDP to activate your data. That also makes it accessible to Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics. If you have those solutions, you can send it to Adobe Analytics, send the same information to Target, and then to third-party destinations such as Facebook through what we call Event 140. Where do I find Adobe Data Collection? If you log into the Experience Cloud and have permissions to this, you should see it on the home page. There are really a couple of ways to get to it. One of them is the little dots in the top right. You can access it through that menu or you should see it on the quick access menu. I’ve highlighted that here in red, but this is how you access it from the user interface. We won’t go into a deep dive on this, but I do want to introduce everyone to the user interface if you have not seen this before. There’s some things on that home page that are really valuable. You’ll see some navigation links on the left that we’ll talk about in just a minute. The bottom section includes three sets of instructions to help you get up and running quickly. The first one is just to be able to start collecting web data using the Web SDK. You can create a property in tags and install that extension. You can install and configure the mobile SDK to collect data from your mobile app. And then there is the third one, which is really what we call a quick start, is sending conversion data to meta or Facebook and Instagram. So those are some tools that you can access quickly from the home page to help you get up and running. We won’t talk about all of the items on the left nav here today, but I do want to highlight a few items in the data collection UI and speak just for a minute about licensing. You’ll notice a couple of red asterisks on here. Adobe customers have access to tags and data stream features of Adobe data collection. Some of the more advanced capabilities such as event forwarding and monitoring, those are included if you have a license to real-time CDP, Prime, and Ultimate. Other customers can purchase that separately. We call that real-time CDP connections to license event forwarding and monitoring. If you have questions about this, please contact your account team for more information. Tags, you’ll notice at the upper left, that used to be known as launch. These are just client tools for collecting web and mobile data. Data streams, that’s where you configure data to be sent to the Adobe Edge network. And then, the event forwarding, that’s server to server sharing of event data to other applications such as Meta or Facebook. Now let’s talk a little bit about some of the use cases. I recommend actually, as you think about your strategy, create, this is a pretty simple example, but it’s a good practice to identify what the customer experience is and then tie that to the flow of data as well as your business objective. We’re going to go through three examples here. And for each one, we’ll start with the customer experience and review the data flow. In our first example, a company wants to sell additional products related to an item the customer just purchased. So the customer experience, the visitor purchases a product on your website, the visitor returns to the homepage, and then sees a cross-sell offer for other products. So how does the data flow across? In this case, the web SDK is capturing data from the website and sending it to Adobe’s Edge network. The visitor qualifies for an audience in a target activity and then target sends a personalized experience back to the browser to attempt to sell that other product or related products. Let’s talk through another use case, media suppression. So a great way to get return on your investment with Adobe is by reducing paid media waste and having lower latency capabilities to suppress paid media is a great way to do that. So in this case, the company is looking to minimize paid media waste by suppressing ads for a product that the customer just purchased. So our customer experience, the visitor may see an ad for a product on Facebook, the visitor then purchases the product on your website, and then the end result of that experience is the customer no longer sees ads for the product they just purchased. Isn’t that annoying when you go and buy something and then for hours later, you’re still seeing retargeting ads for it. So we have the tools and technology to improve that customer experience. So the data flow, the web SDK again, will send the data to Adobe’s Edge network. The customer information is collected in Adobe Experience Platform and the Edge network then forwards the purchase event to Meta. So for our last example, we have a company who would like to send an email reminder to customers who did not complete a purchase with the goal of getting them to come back to the site and complete the purchase and with the goal of increasing sales. So our customer experience is a customer views a product on the website, adds it to the cart, then they abandon cart, and then following that, the customer receives an email with an offer encouraging them to complete purchase. So the flow of data for that one is the web SDK again sends data to Adobe’s Edge network. That gets passed downstream and a customer will qualify for an abandoned cart audience in Adobe Journey Optimizer. In this case, we’re using Adobe Journey Optimizer to send email and so the customer will get that email quickly in response to the abandoned cart audience qualification. So that brings us to the glossary. I’m not going to read through all of this. So we’ve talked about some of this along the way, but this is really kind of a leave behind for you all to make sure that you understand the different terminology that we have here and how it’s changed over time. And then I want to take a couple minutes to highlight some resources. For those of you who attended Adobe Summit, those sessions were recorded. If you didn’t attend Summit, I think you can register and still view them, but they’re still out there. There’s some really good content out there about migrating to the web SDK, a session on event forwarding. There’s some tips and trips for data collection activation that go deeper. We have also a wealth of resources on Adobe Experience League. There’s a tutorial that’s really good that will help you implement the web SDK. The quick start workflow that I mentioned earlier to send data to Meta, there’s information on that. We’ve talked about the web SDK, the mobile SDK, terminology, all that is out there on Experience League as well. There’s an overview of event forwarding, which gives you that capability to share data with Facebook and other destinations. There’s some considerations for moving your tags to event forwarding, and then finally edge segmentation within real-time CDP to enable faster personalization. So with that, I am going to turn it back over to Ben and we’ll take some time for questions. Yeah, awesome. Great job, Bobby. Thanks for that overview. If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them in the chat and we can address them. Also note if you join late, the session is being recorded and we’ll send over the recording and the slides afterwards so you can review at your leisure. So if you have any questions, feel free to post in the chat. If you don’t feel like typing, happy to – if you want to just come off mute. Oh, there we go. We got a question from Venkat. Question – do you want to take this one, Bobby, or I can? Doesn’t matter. How does the integration outside Adobe work? Are you talking – Venkat, are you talking about sort of data ingestion or data – data activation or just all of the above? How does the integration work? Either way. It’s all of the above. Any third party integration? I’m sorry, what? Any third party tool integration or the both? Got it. Just talking. I think – oh, sorry, go ahead, Ben. No, go for it, Bobby. Yeah, so I think I heard – it was a little hard to hear that question, but I think you’re wanting to understand how the outside Adobe integration. So that’s where event forwarding comes into play. We have the capability to send data from our edge network to third party applications. So it really kind of depends on what the destination is. In this case, we have some pre-built integrations with Meta, for example. So if you’re using ads on Facebook or Instagram, we have a way to forward events there. There are some other ways that you can also share data with other applications. So you may want to read that event forwarding article unexpectedly to get more information on that. Ben, anything you would add to that? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, there’s a variety of methods for, let’s say, sending data into the Adobe platform from third party tools. Like, Bobby showed the server-side API as an option. I mean, you can send in batch file. You can send in server-side. I mean, there’s streaming. There’s even just, you can send in a CSV file as well, too, for sending in data from a variety of platforms. For activation, for outbound, there’s edge. There’s event forwarding that Bobby just mentioned as well, too. And there’s more, even more, let’s say, server-side activation out of more real-time CDP or Adobe Journey Optimizer as well, too. So there’s a variety of product ties, and it’s pretty easy to set up, let’s say, custom integrations from a batch or a streaming perspective with third party tools, third party platforms. Great. Anyone else have any questions? I have a question for you. This is Josh Middleton from Elevent South. I wonder if you had any recommendations or anything you’ve seen from other companies who have kind of converted over, transitioning from launch to the web SDK. Is there anything that we need to be considered of for those of us that have a relatively large portfolio that transition and conversion from launch to the web SDK itself? Got it. Go for it, Bobby. Yeah, there are a couple of things. And then Bill, feel free to chime in. Oops, sorry. That was one of the reasons why we put this session together is, I mean, there are some, that session about migrating to web SDK is maybe a good one to look at because it talks about making that move over. But that’s also where we have put together some of these recommendations for creating a strategy is because some customers have kind of dived right into the technology without really thinking through all the applications of their cutover. So how you cut over may vary from, depending on how complex your properties are, if you have multiple websites, for example, maybe you do one of those at a time. But it’s really important to just kind of come up with that formal plan and share it with stakeholders as opposed to just kind of looking at it purely as a technology product. So data is so important to your strategy for customer experiences as well as analytics that it’s worth investing some time in there. Ben, anything you want to add there? Yeah, I think, I mean, the one thing to think about is if your current implementation sort of pre-web SDK is, you know, you have Adobe Analytics and you’re sending data from Adobe Analytics into the experience platform by the analytics connector, that’s probably going to be your biggest lift in effort in sort of making that change because essentially that’s the data going to the experience platform is going directly from web SDK into the experience platform. It’s not going via Adobe Analytics. So there’s definitely work in how you set up your schemas, how you’re setting up and defining those signals as they come into the platform. So that, I mean, definitely keep in mind that that’s, you know, that’s a decent sized project to make sure that that’s all done thoroughly and effectively. I say from Adobe Analytics, that’s probably the number one thing to think about. For plugging in, like, let’s say net new data sources, I think, you know, it’s actually you’ll, it can be surprisingly easy so that can be a pretty straightforward process. But yeah, just think about Adobe Analytics is probably the first one to think about is, you know, could be time consuming to make that migration. Yeah, I think that makes sense. It’s been an interesting conversation on our side just to give you some feedback, right, for a company that has multiple websites and multiple apps using Adobe Analytics trying to transition from launch and workspace or the data warehouse over to CGA and the CDP, right, it’s really a much larger conversation, like you said, with the stakeholder. So we’re trying to make sure we cover all the bases, so to speak, right, for lack of a better metaphor. And then try to put a plan together to successfully do that, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you’re on the right track. Yeah, it’s, you know, with multiple, especially with multiple properties, maybe multiple reports, where it’s probably very likely multiple reports, where it can be a big project. So, you know, it has to be planned out like any sort of larger size implementation. But you know, as Bobby called out, the upside in, you know, a lot of different measures from page load time to speed to ingestion, speed to activation, taking advantage of some of the current and future Adobe capabilities, which are going to require the web SDK and mobile SDK. I think it’s, you know, it’s worth the effort and it’s probably, you can make that case for the lift on that project. So that’s what I think about. All right. Yeah, thanks for the feedback. Appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. Anyone else have any questions? Thank you for these. These are great questions. Keep them coming. Anyone else have anything? Yeah, as Bobby mentioned, these summit sessions are a great place to start here. The first thing on the page here. But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah. And then, you know, I would expect more for the next Adobe Summit coming up. I do want to put in one mention for, you know, I would recommend, you know, engage Adobe Consulting if you can do that or a qualified partner to help you with your implementation. There are a lot of moving parts here. And so there are, you know, Adobe Consulting has a wealth of expertise doing that. We have some really well qualified partners, too. So you know, they can be a great source of lessons learned from doing multiple implementations across customers in different industries. Great. And if you know, Katie just put a link to a survey in the chat there. So if you don’t mind taking a second to leave feedback, that would be greatly appreciated. So one more call here for questions. If not, we can. Oh, I see Carol’s typing one. The rename of launch is now called tags. Great question. Yeah. All right. I think we’re going to call it here. Thank you again for the great questions. Thanks Bobby for a great presentation. And yeah, look for us to follow up with the recording and the slides here. And yeah, take a look at some of the materials in the slides and enjoy your journey with Adobe technology. Yep. Thank you very much for your time today. Thanks all.