Supplement First-party Profiles with Partner-provided Attributes
- This functionality is available to customers who have licensed Real-Time CDP (App Service), Adobe Experience Platform Activation, Real-Time CDP, Real-Time CDP Prime, Real-Time CDP Ultimate. Read more about these packages in the product descriptions and contact your Adobe representative for more information.
Supplement first-party profiles with attributes from trusted data partners to improve your data foundation and gain new insights into your customer base and gain better audience optimization.
Why consider this use case :headding-anchor:why-this-use-case
Most brands, even those which are rich with first party data, can benefit from streamlining their data and gaining a more nuanced understanding of customers, their behaviors, patterns, and preferences.
Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform can help brands responsibly supplement their first-party data with valuable insights, identifiers, and attributes from one or more trusted partners.
Adobe understands there is no one-size-fits-all approach and allows for seamless interoperability with data and identity partners to foster individualized and thoughtful engagement across all stages of the customer lifecycle. These capabilities are underpinned by a trusted data governance framework, allowing for nuanced control on where and how partner data gets used. For instance, you may want to use partner provided insights for segmentation but not for personalization.
For example, follow the steps described in this use case when you need to enrich your customer records with demographic and intent signals.
Prerequisites and planning
As you consider supplementing your own first-party profiles with attributes from data partners, you should discuss and address the following details on the data enrichment loop with the data partner:
- Think about the location where the audience list will be exported out of Real-Time CDP, to be shared with the data vendor. This location needs to support file export.
- What are the identifiers that are expected by the data vendor so they can layer on additional attributes?
- How will the file containing partner-provided attributes be ingested back into Real-Time CDP? For example, the files can be ingested through cloud storage source connectors such as Amazon S3 or SFTP.
- What is the cadence with which you expect partner-provided attributes to be brought back into Real-Time CDP and refreshed?
Video walkthrough :headding-anchor:video-walkthrough
View the video tutorial below for a walkthrough of how to supplement first-party audiences with partner-provided attributes:
How to achieve the use case: high-level overview :headding-anchor:achieve-the-use-case-high-level
- As a customer, you license attributes from the data partner.
- As a customer, you extend your profile data and governance model to accommodate partner-provided attributes.
- As a customer, you onboard the audiences that you want to be enriched with the data partner. Generally, these audiences are keyed off input identifiers like Personally Identifiable Information (PII) elements like email, name, address, or others.
- The partner appends licensed attributes for the profiles that they are able to match against. Optionally, a Partner ID can be included and ingested into the partner scoped ID namespace.
- As a customer, you load attributes from the data partner into customer profiles in Real-Time CDP.
How to achieve the use case: Step-by-step instructions :headding-anchor:step-by-step-instructions
Read through the sections below which include links to further documentation, to complete each of the steps in the high-level overview above.
License attributes from the partner :headding-anchor:license-attributes-from-partner
This step is covered in the prerequisites and Adobe assumes that you have the right contractual agreements in place with trusted data vendors to augment your first-party profiles.
Extend your profile data and governance model to accommodate partner-provided attributes. :headding-anchor:extend-governance-model
At this point, you are extending your data management framework in Real-Time CDP to accommodate partner-provided attributes.
You have the option to create a new schema of the XDM Individual Profile class, or extend an existing schema of the same type to include partner-provided attributes. Adobe strongly recommends creating a new schema with a new set of field groups that best represent the additional attributes from the data vendor. This ensures that your data schemas are clean and can evolve independently of each other.
To include partner-provided attributes in a schema, you can either create a new field group with the attributes that you expect, or you can use one of the preconfigured field groups provided by Adobe.
Read the documentation pages below for more information:
Also in this step, think about how your data governance model changes as you expand your data management strategy to include third-party data provided by the partner. Explore the considerations in the documentation links below:
- (Coming soon) Keep third-party data in a separate dataset so that deleting it and undoing integrations is easy.
- (Coming soon) Use the dataset expiration functionality on the dataset for clients who purchased the data hygiene add-on.
- (Coming soon) Exercise caution when creating derived datasets which pull in third-party data, because once mixed together the only solution to remove the third-party data is to delete the whole derived dataset.
Read about how to define identity fields in the Experience Platform user interface.
Export audiences that you want to be enriched when keyed off Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or hashed-PII :headding-anchor:export-audiences
Export the audiences that you want the partner to enrich. Use the cloud storage destinations provided by Real-Time CDP, such as Amazon S3 or SFTP. Read the following documentation pages to complete this step:
- Amazon S3 destination documentation page
- SFTP destination documentation page
- How to connect to a destination
- How to export data to a cloud storage destination
Your data partner appends licensed attributes for the profiles that they are able to match against :headding-anchor:partner-appends-attributes
In this step, your data partner appends licensed attributes for the exported audience. The output is generally available as a flat file that can be ingested back into Real-Time CDP. Read more about ingesting files into Real-Time CDP.
Real-Time CDP appends enriched attributes into the customer profile :headding-anchor:ingest-data
You now need to ingest data from the partner through a source connector to bring the enriched data back into Real-Time CDP and supplement your profiles with partner-provided data.
Some recommended source connectors for this purpose might be:
Limitations and troubleshooting :headding-anchor:limitations-and-troubleshooting
Note the following limitations as you explore the use case described on this page:
- If you select to use Partner IDs, be aware that these IDs are not used when building your identity graph.
Other use cases achieved through partner data support :headding-anchor:other-use-cases
Explore further use cases enabled through partner data support in Real-Time CDP:
- Use third-party data support in Real-Time CDP to expand your profile base with prospect profiles from data partners and engage with them to acquire or reach new customers.
- Personalize onsite experiences for unknown visitors using partner-aided visitor recognition during the visit without the user authenticating or having prior history with your brand.
- Expanded activation of prospect profiles and prospect audiences to select destinations.