Documentation Real-Time Customer Data Platform Collaboration

Connect with advertisers or publishers

Last update: April 3, 2025

AVAILABILITY

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) Collaboration is available to United States customers at this time, with global availability coming soon. Contact your Adobe representative for more information. Learn how to get started.

Establishing a connection between two parties of a collaboration (most commonly an advertiser and a publisher) is the prerequisite in Real-Time CDP Collaboration to companies working together on campaigns. Publishers and advertisers alike can set up connections. Whichever party initiates the connection will afterwards be the connection owner.

High-level workflow

At a high level, to establish a connection between an advertiser and a publisher, the workflow looks like below:

The advertiser browses publishers and discovers one that they would like to work with
The advertiser sends a connection invite.
The publisher accepts the invite.
The advertiser sends connection settings including match keys and others. These connection settings represent the in-product terms of the collaboration.
The publisher accepts connection settings. If desired, the publisher can reject the initial connection settings and request that the advertiser submits revised connection settings.

High-level diagram of the advertiser-publisher connection process.

Once the items above are completed, the collaborators can proceed to create a project to run overlap reports and kick off advertising campaigns.

IMPORTANT

Once the connection between two collaborators has been established, the connection settings cannot be revised anymore.

Send invite

To set up a connection, select Connect when browsing the publisher inventory in the discover publishers screen.

Connect selector

At this point, the invite is out and you can preview the connection settings, but cannot edit them. You can view the pending invite in the My connections tab. The status of the connection is Invite sent.

Pending invite sent to publisher displayed in the My connections view.

Once the collaborator accepts the invite, you can configure the connection settings and send them to the collaborator to review and accept.

Connection settings

After the invite is sent, you can preview the connection settings. The invite must be accepted before you can finish setting up the connection.

The connection settings view in the preview state.

Once the connection is accepted by your collaborator, you can now start setting up the connection settings for the connection. The connection settings define the terms of your collaboration, such as the use cases that you will accomplish together, the match keys that you will use in projects, and more.

To set up and share connection settings with your collaborator, navigate to My connections. For any connections with the status Pending, you can select Set up connection to configure the connection settings.

The My connections view with a Pending connection and its Set up connection option highlighted.

You can edit and define the fields below:

Set up connection view

Use cases

Use cases are prefilled with all available use cases. You can choose which use cases your connection will use by selecting Edit and toggling off any use cases you do not want. Selected use cases will affect which views and options are available within your projects.

Use cases

Match keys

Match keys are prefilled with the ones that you selected at your organizational level. You can toggle off any match keys that you do not want used in this connection, but you cannot add any match keys that were not selected when setting up the organization.

Match keys

Credit split

Use the credit split section to determine which of the two collaborating parties will cover the costs for the activities.

Credit split

Agreements

Before you can proceed with this connection, you must acknowledge that a data sharing agreement between the two parties exists.

Legal agreements.

After you have made your selection, select Submit to send the suggested settings to your collaborator for review.

If you are receiving proposed connection settings from your collaborator, you can either Accept or Reject those settings. Before accepting the connection settings, you need to acknowledge and confirm that a legal agreement is in place between you and the collaborator. If you are rejecting connection settings, reach out to your collaborator outside of the product and discuss how they should revise the connection settings for you to accept them.

Delete connections

You can delete any connections with collaborators that you do not want to continue working with. To delete existing connections:

Navigate to Connect > My connections.
Select View connection on the connection card to access the connection that you want to delete.
Select the delete icon to bring up the delete connection confirmation dialog.
Confirm the deletion by selecting Delete.

WARNING

Once the connection is deleted, you will no longer be connected with the collaborator and all existing projects that are part of the collaboration will be permanently deleted and unrecoverable.

Next steps

After establishing a connection with your collaborator, you and your collaborator can now create projects.

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