Connect to destinations

Hi everyone, this is Michelle. Join me to learn about connecting to destinations in the real-time customer data platform. A prerequisite to sending or activating audiences in the real-time CDP is to set up a destination with the credentials required to connect to it first. This is typically done by an administrator role, but every organization is different in terms of team structure, so you may very well be wearing multiple hats. I’m in the product and I navigate it to destinations in the left rail. Then I selected accounts at the top here. These accounts, which are really destinations, are instances of a destination. For example, there are multiple Amazon S3 accounts, but they use different credentials because the nature of the data going into them is different. There are other types of destination accounts we’ve connected to listed here as well. Now let’s have a look at the browse tab. Here I see the named instances of each destination account. This is all demo stuff, but you can see several of them are going to the same account. This could be different audiences going to the same Amazon S3 bucket, or it could even be different data types. Now this is a bit cart before the horse, but if I go into accounts again, I can update the connection attributes or credentials by clicking on the three picker here. It’s in this modal that I can edit the name, access key, or secret key, etc. Since I’m not changing anything, I’ll cancel out of this. So where do you set up destinations in the first place? I’ll go up here to catalog and select that. This displays all of the destinations organized by category. As I scroll, you can see Adobe applications, advertising, analytics, and cloud storage, etc. In the cloud storage group, you can tell if a connection has been set up as it has for Amazon S3, because the action is activate. If a connection hasn’t been configured, then the action is set up. However, you can create new instances of destinations that have existing connections. Simply select the three picker and select the configure new destination link. From here, enter the access key, secret key, and any other details needed to connect to the new instance destination. From there, you’d move on in the workflow by using the navigation up here. Click on next. Of course, the next button will become active once I actually connect to the destination with my new account information. I’ll cancel out of here since I’m not setting up the connection. This screen shows me all of the current connections to the Amazon S3 destinations, but I’ll cancel out of here as well. Connection information is different based on the destination. I’ll show you an example. We’ll look at Google customer match under advertising. Once I select set up and then connect to the destination, I see that it prompts me to choose the Google account that I want to connect to. So that’s much different than setting up the S3 bucket. I’ll cancel out of this to back out of the connection flow. Now I’ll go back to one of my connected Amazon S3 destinations. Once you’ve established the connection with the proper credentials, either you or someone else on your team can activate data to that destination. They’d simply select the destination name, the data type, and I’ll mention that the S3 destination can accept multiple types and others may not have these options, and then select next to go through the remaining steps of the workflow. I hope this video provides you with the necessary information to connect to your own destinations in the real-time CDP. Thanks and good luck.