Activate audiences to edge personalization destinations

Overview overview

Adobe Experience Platform uses edge segmentation together with edge destinations to enable customers to create and target audiences at high scale, in real time. This capability helps you configure same-page and next-page personalization use cases.

Examples of edge destinations are the Adobe Target and the Custom personalization connections.

This article explains the workflow required to activate audiences to Adobe Experience Platform edge destinations. When used together with edge segmentation and the optional profile attributes mapping, these destinations enable same-page and next-page personalization use cases on your web and mobile properties.

For a brief overview on how to configure the Adobe Target connection for edge personalization, watch the video below.

For a brief overview of how to share audiences and profile attributes to Adobe Target and custom personalization destinations, watch the video below.

Use cases use-cases

Use Adobe personalization solutions, such as Adobe Target, or your own personalization partner platforms (for example, Optimizely, Pega), as well as proprietary systems (for example, in-house CMS) to power a deeper customer personalization experience via the Custom Personalization destination. All this while also leveraging Experience Platform Edge Network data collection & segmentation capabilities.

The use cases described below include both site personalization and targeted on-site advertising.

To enable these use cases, customers need a quick, streamlined way of retrieving both audiences and profile attribute information from Experience Platform, and sending this information to either the Adobe Target or the Custom Personalization connections in the Experience Platform UI.

Same-page personalization same-page

A user visits a page of your website. You can use the current page visit information (for example referring URL, browser language, embedded product info) to select the next action or decision (for example, personalization), using the Custom personalization connection for non-Adobe platforms (for example, Pega, Optimizely or others.).

Next-page personalization next-page

A user visits Page A on your website. Based on this interaction, the user has qualified for a set of audiences. The user then clicks on a link that takes them from Page A to Page B. The audiences that the user had qualified for during the previous interaction on Page A, together with the profile updates determined by the current website visit, will be used to power the next action or decision (for example, which advertising banner to display to the visitor, or, in case of A/B testing, which version of the page to display).

Next-session personalization next-session

A user visits several pages on your website. Based on these interactions, the user has qualified for a set of audiences. The user then terminates the current browsing session.

The following day, the user returns to the same customer website. The audiences they had qualified for during the previous interaction with all the visited website pages, together with the profile updates determined by the current website visit, will be used to select the next action / decision (for example, which advertising banner to display to the visitor, or, in case of A/B testing, which version of the page to display).

Personalize a home page banner home-page-banner

A home rental and sales company wants to personalize their home page with a banner, based on audience qualifications in Adobe Experience Platform. The company can select what audiences should get a personalized experience and send those audiences to Adobe Target as targeting criteria for their Target offer.

Prerequisites prerequisites

Configure a datastream in the Data Collection UI configure-datastream

The first step in setting up your personalization destination is to configure a datastream for the Experience Platform Web SDK. This is done in the Data Collection UI.

When configuring the datastream, under Adobe Experience Platform make sure that both Edge Segmentation and Personalization Destinations are selected.

For more details on how to set up a datastream, follow the instructions described in the Platform Web SDK documentation.

Create an Active-On-Edge merge policy create-merge-policy

After you have created your destination connection, you must create an Active-On-Edge merge policy. The Active-On-Edge merge policy ensures that audiences are constantly evaluated on the edge and are available for real-time and next-page personalization use case.

Follow the instructions on creating a merge policy, and make sure to enable the Active-On-Edge Merge Policy toggle.

Create a new audience in Platform create-audience

After you have created the Active-On-Edge merge policy, you must create a new audience in Platform.

Follow the audience builder guide to create your new audience, and make sure to assign it the Active-On-Edge merge policy that you created in the previous step.

Create a destination connection connect-destination

After you have configured your datastream, you can start configuring your personalization destination.

Follow the destination connection creation tutorial for detailed instructions on how to create a new destination connection.

Depending on the destination that you are configuring, refer to the following articles for destination-specific prerequisites and related information:

Select your destination select-destination

After you completed the prerequisites, you can now select the edge personalization destination to use for same-page and next-page personalization.

Select your audiences select-audiences

Use the check boxes to the left of the audience names to select the audiences that you want to activate to the destination, then select Next.

To select the audiences that you want to activate to the destination, use the check boxes to the left of the audience names, then select Next.

You can select from multiple types of audiences, depending on their origin:

Map attributes mapping

Select the attributes based on which you want to enable personalization use cases for your users. This means that if the value of an attribute changes or if an attribute is added to a profile, that profile will become a member of the audience and will be activated to the personalization destination.

Adding attributes is optional and you can still proceed to the next step and enable same-page and next-page personalization without selecting attributes. If you do not add any attributes in this step, personalization will still occur based on the audience membership and identity map qualifications for profiles.

Select source attributes select-source-attributes

To add source attributes, select the Add new field control on the Source field column and search or navigate to your desired XDM attribute field, as shown below.

Select target attributes select-target-attributes

To add target attributes, select the Add new field control on the Target field column and type in the custom attribute name that you want to map the source attribute to.

Schedule audience export scheduling

By default, the Audience schedule page shows only the newly selected audiences that you chose in the current activation flow.

To see all the audiences being activated to your destination, use the filtering option and disable the Show new audiences only filter.

On the Audience schedule page, select each audience, then use the Start date and End date selectors to configure the time interval for sending data to your destination.

Select Next to go to the Review page.

Review review

On the Review page, you can see a summary of your selection. Select Cancel to break up the flow, Back to modify your settings, or Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

Consent policy evaluation consent-policy-evaluation

If your organization purchased Adobe Healthcare Shield or Adobe Privacy & Security Shield, select View applicable consent policies to see which consent policies are applied and how many profiles are included in the activation as a result of them. Read about consent policy evaluation for more information.

Data usage policy checks data-usage-policy-checks

In the Review step, Experience Platform also checks for any data usage policy violations. Shown below is an example where a policy is violated. You cannot complete the audience activation workflow until you have resolved the violation. For information on how to resolve policy violations, read about data usage policy violations in the data governance documentation section.

Filter audiences filter-audiences

In this step you can use the available filters on the page to display only the audiences whose schedule or mapping has been updated as part of this workflow. You can also toggle which table columns you want to see.

If you are satisfied with your selection and no policy violations have been detected, select Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.