Kevel connection kevel

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.

Use the Kevel streaming destination to activate Adobe audiences directly into Kevel’s UserDB and Segment Management APIs and support real-time targeting at ad decision time. You can also export profile attributes, such as a user’s incrementality testing group assignment, for Kevel to act on at decision time.

Use cases use-cases

Target retail media audiences in real time. 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.

Measure incremental impact. You can also export a user’s group assignment as a profile attribute to power Kevel’s incrementality testing. Kevel holds out a control cohort and compares it against exposed users to quantify the causal lift your campaigns drive, rather than relying on proxy metrics such as new-to-brand counts or correlation-based lift. This lets you prove incremental sales and conversions while Kevel minimizes revenue impact by serving the next best eligible ad to held-out users.

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 custom-identity-namespaces

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

This means:

Identity mapping behavior identity-mapping-behavior

Supported audiences supported-audiences

The Kevel destination supports the following audience origins and audience data types.

Supported audiences by audience data type:

Export type and frequency export-type-frequency

The Kevel destination exports data using the following type and 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 audiences to this destination activate

To send audiences to Kevel, follow the workflow in Activate audiences to streaming destinations.

Deactivate 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 generates its own UserDB update call.

Profile attributes (optional) profile-attributes

You can optionally map XDM profile attributes to Kevel. The destination recognizes the following target attribute name.

To map a group attribute, add a new mapping row in the Mapping step and configure:

Validate the 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 sample-payload

Experience Platform sends the following sample payload to Kevel’s UserDB API.

PUT /udb/{networkId}/segments?userKey=ECID-12345&group=42
{
  "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 you mapped to Kevel’s identity slots.

Below is an example of an exported profile showing:

{
  "attributes": {
    "kevelGroup": 42
  },
  "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 kevel-profile-interpretation

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.

When a kevelGroup attribute is mapped and present on the profile, each UserDB update also includes the user’s group assignment as the group query parameter, enabling Kevel’s incrementality testing feature to determine test and control cohort membership at ad decision time.

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