Real-Time Customer Data Platform user interface and workflow

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. Today I’m going to walk you through the real-time customer data platform UI using a common workflow. At a high level, I’ll give you brief insights into how data is brought into Real-Time CDP, gathered, controlled, or manipulated as needed, formed into audiences, and then sent out to activation partners. We won’t go too deep into any of these areas as each of them have additional videos to show you exactly how to use them, but in this video, I just want to give you that big picture view of how the features work together. To get into the platform UI, you can go to platform.adobe.com in your browser, and after logging in with your Adobe ID or your company ID if you have single sign-on available, you’ll end up here in the UI. Even though you see Adobe Experience Platform up in the top left corner, this is also the UI for real-time customer data platform or Real-Time CDP. You can also go to experience.adobe.com, and after logging in, go to the application picker and choose Experience Platform. Once in the platform UI, you will see many options on the left rail to take you into different features that you will use throughout your Real-Time CDP workflows. We’ll run through some of them in this video. Also, by the way, what you see in your account might be different from what I see in mine, depending on your individual user permissions and the specific platform capabilities your company has licensed. And my other giant caveat for this video is that I’m not going to talk about every single feature, so you will definitely want to learn about the additional features as well to see if and how they fit into your workflow. On the homepage, you’ll see a basic dashboard that informs you about some important business metrics regarding some of the features, as well as giving you links to recent items accessed or created. These and additional metrics will also display in related areas of real-time CDP, such as the profiles area, you know, the profiles UI or the audience’s UI. The homepage also has links directly to documentation regarding some of these topics and links directly into the interface where you can set them up, which is basically the same as linking from the left rail. And first, maybe a quick thought about roles. As we go through some of these features in the video, think about the role of the people that will use each feature. Some of these features might be more apt to be used by data architects, some by developers, some by administrators, and some by marketers. You may also be wearing multiple hats at your company and may be responsible for several features in the workflow. So for this reason, we created this video regarding multiple features, knowing that any viewer might be involved in only some or all features. So be sure and, you know, let other people know about this video who might have those roles. So let’s dive in. Now, before we start bringing all of our data into Real-Time CDP, the first step in integrating data from various systems is having a common language between them so that they can be integrated and used throughout the system. For this, you will create one or more schemas. XDM or Experience Data Model is Adobe Experience Platform’s common language or schema. It is highly customizable to meet the needs of enterprise data. As you can see here, I have several schemas already created. If I click into one of them, you can see that I have fields that are basic to any experience event, and I have added additional field groups that account for the type of data that I will be bringing into Real-Time CDP. When creating these schemas, you can use pre-built field groups that suit your needs, or you can create custom ones that are more specific to your business. The next step to delivering a fantastic customer experience is getting all the data together in one platform. Adobe Experience Platform sources provide brands the ability to collect information out of disparate silos and centralize it. This includes fully managed connections to Adobe applications, as well as connectors to easily ingest data from cloud storage partners, CRM systems, and more. In addition to those connections, you can also deploy Adobe Experience Platform tags, which is Adobe’s tag management system and client-side platform that allows you to bring data directly into platform via web or mobile SDKs. As this data is brought into Adobe Experience Platform, you will select datasets for the data to land in, which you have configured with the appropriate schema and settings. So clicking on datasets in the left rail allows us to browse a list of current datasets, and when we click in on one, we can see the ingestion activity for that dataset, and we can click to the data governance tab to control how data can be used. This is also where we can select to send this data to profile so that we can use it to create audiences. With data loaded into Adobe Experience Platform, Realtime CDP uses the Realtime Customer Profile to generate unified profiles. To do this, identities from different data sources are matched against each other using the identity service. Using the identity graph, Realtime Customer Profile stitches data together from various systems, providing a complete view of the customer. Next, marketers can create audiences from those profiles to understand and take action on them. The Audience Builder in Realtime CDP is super flexible, allowing you to compose audiences based on other audiences and their metadata, as well as allowing you to use a rule builder to create audiences based on individual attributes and events from profiles. You can also get audiences from second party data partners in our segment match area, or even extend your audiences to similar people by using the lookalike audiences feature. After creating key audiences, the next step in the journey is to start activating those profiles and audiences across multiple channels. This is where destinations come into play. These are pre-built integrations to send data from Realtime CDP to downstream marketing and advertising technology platforms, including cloud storage partners and systems, social networks, etc. In this catalog screen, you can see the list of partners that are natively integrated into Realtime CDP. Clicking on a partner shows more details about that partner integration and links to documentation to learn more. Lastly, clicking on the System View tab in either Sources or Destinations brings you to an overview of where the data is coming from and where it’s going. This is a great view to really understand the sources of data flowing in and where Realtime CDP is sending data. Of course, there’s a lot to learn about each step in the process, but hopefully that gives you an idea at a high level about the workflow of Adobe’s Realtime Customer Data Platform. Good luck.