Kevel connection kevel

Overview overview

Kevel provides the AI-enabled technology and expert guidance that help innovative commerce leaders launch, scale, and succeed in retail media. Kevel’s Retail Media Cloud powers targeted, attributable, customizable ad formats for on-site and off-site advertising.

The Kevel streaming destination for Adobe Experience Platform enables customers to activate Adobe audiences directly into Kevel’s UserDB and Segment Management APIs to support real-time targeting at ad decision time.

Use cases use-cases

You can activate rich first-party behavioral audiences across your retail media experiences to deliver more relevant ads and stronger performance. In Experience Platform, you build high-value, intent-based audiences, such as frequent category shoppers or users with recent product interest, and sync those memberships to Kevel in real time. Kevel immediately makes these segments available for ad decisioning, enabling precise targeting for sponsored products and other formats across search, browse, and app experiences. As soon as users qualify, you can act on these signals to drive more relevant impressions, better targeting, and improved measurement and ROAS.

Prerequisites prerequisites

To prepare for using the Kevel destination, ensure the following prerequisites are met:

Supported identities supported-identities

The Kevel destination supports activation for any identity that your application may use when sending ad requests to Kevel. You may map up to three identity namespaces to generate corresponding UserDB records.

Kevel supports the following Experience Platform identity namespaces:

Support for custom identity namespaces

The Kevel destination also accepts custom namespaces, as defined in your Experience Platform implementation.

This means:

Identity mapping behavior

Supported audiences supported-audiences

Export type and frequency export-type-frequency

Connect to the destination connect

Follow the standard Experience Platform connect a destination workflow.

Authenticate to destination authenticate

When connecting to Kevel, provide the following field:

Fill in destination details destination-details

After authentication, configure:

Activate segments to this destination activate

To send audiences to Kevel, follow the workflow in
Activate profiles and segments to streaming segment export destinations.

Deactivating audiences deactivate

When an audience is deactivated or removed from the Kevel destination in Experience Platform, Experience Platform stops sending further profile qualification updates for that audience. Any existing segment created in Kevel remains available and is not automatically deleted.

If the Kevel segment is currently being used in an active campaign, Kevel prevents deletion to avoid disrupting live delivery. In this case, deactivation in Experience Platform results in the following:

To fully stop targeting in Kevel, ensure the segment is removed from any active campaigns in Kevel’s campaign management system.

Map attributes and identities map

Kevel requires:

During activation, select the identity namespaces you have configured for Kevel. Each identity will generate its own UserDB update call.

Exported data / Validate data export exported-data

When a profile qualifies for or exits an audience, Experience Platform sends a streaming update to Kevel.

Sample payload received by Kevel UserDB

PUT /udb/{networkId}/segments?userKey=ECID-12345
{
  "segments": [1723, 3344, 9988]
}

Sample Experience Platform profile used during export sample-profile

When activating audiences to the Kevel destination, Experience Platform sends profile fragments that contain both segment qualifications and the identities mapped by the customer to Kevel’s identity slots.

Below is an example of an exported profile showing:

{
  "segmentMembership": {
    "ups": {
      "9d161bbb-c785-474a-965b-7d7bc2adf879": {
        "status": "realized",
        "lastQualificationTime": "2025-12-10T21:43:38.541076Z"
      }
    }
  },
  "identityMap": {
    "kevel_user_key1": [
      {
        "id": "ECID-fN1zo"
      },
      {
        "id": "ECID-9Xr2p"
      }
    ],
    "kevel_user_key2": [
      {
        "id": "GAID-4oic4"
      }
    ],
    "kevel_user_key3": [
      {
        "id": "IDFA-nB5fU"
      }
    ]
  }
}

How Kevel interprets this profile

With the Kevel destination configuration, each mapped identity generates a distinct UserDB record, meaning Kevel receives:

This allows the same person to be recognized at ad decision time using any of their available identities, with each identity carrying an identical set of segment memberships.

Data usage and governance data-usage-governance

All Adobe Experience Platform destinations are compliant with data usage policies when handling your data. For detailed information on how Adobe Experience Platform enforces data governance, read the Data Governance overview.

Additional resources additional-resources