Adobe DX Solutions Unified Holiday Readiness Guide

Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) plays a critical role in powering real-time customer experiences. As the holiday season approaches, it’s essential to ensure your AEP implementation is optimized for increased traffic, secure data handling, and scalable ingestion.

Predict seasonal demand

To prepare for seasonal traffic spikes, Adobe recommends planning for capacity and monitoring streaming profile ingestion. This includes forecasting data volumes and ensuring your system can handle increased throughput. See Plan for capacity and seasonal traffic for reference.

Prepare for scale

Adobe provides several strategies to ensure your environment is ready for holiday traffic:

• Increase allocated capacity for sandboxes.
• Identify high-throughput dataflows in the monitoring dashboard and apply throttling or filtering where needed.
• Use batch ingestion for lower-latency use cases to optimize performance as described in License usage and capacities: Streaming throughput best practices.

These practices help maintain ingestion reliability and reduce latency during peak periods.

Best practices and guardrails

To stay within operational limits and avoid service disruptions, Adobe recommends following ingestion and profile guardrails:

• Streaming throughput best practices
• Guardrails for Data Ingestion
• Default guardrails for Real-Time Customer Profile data and segmentation
• AEP Blueprints: Guardrails

Security and governance

Adobe emphasizes strong security and governance practices, especially during high-traffic seasons when data sensitivity is heightened.

Refer to Governance, privacy, and security in Adobe Experience Platform: Security for recommendations on how to protect customer data, enforce privacy controls, and maintain compliance across your AEP implementation.

By following these guidelines and leveraging Adobe’s public documentation, organizations can ensure their Adobe Experience Platform is resilient, secure, and ready to deliver exceptional customer experiences throughout the holiday season.

To prepare Adobe Journey Optimizer for the holiday season, organizations should anticipate event spikes and cross-channel complexity, configure journey and frequency rules, and ensure data hygiene and decisioning logic. They must also validate performance at scale, enforce security and API guardrails, and apply post-peak insights to refine future campaigns.

Predict demand

• Based on holiday season compressions and heavier campaign volume, expect:

  • A spike in real-time events and triggered journeys (cart abandonment, last-minute offers)
  • Message saturation risks (higher opt-outs, fatigue)
  • Increased cross-channel complexity (email + push + SMS + in-app)

• Use past year’s metrics (open/click/opt-out rates, journey entry volumes) to model expected loads and set thresholds for your messaging systems.

• Identify likely “quiet windows” or periods of low performance (For example: weekends, holiday days) and plan send volumes accordingly.

Prepare for scale

• Ensure all channel configurations in AJO are set up properly: email, push, SMS, web, in-app. Refer to Set up channel configurations.

• Configure frequency capping and capping rules to control message volumes. See the Frequency capping article.

• Configure channel/journey rule sets: Refer to Work with rule sets.

• Prepare your data hygiene / real-time event streams and segmentation frameworks.

• Ensure you have defined target audiences for holiday campaigns, such as:

  • high-value customers
  • loyal segments
  • cart-abandoners
  • first-time buyers

• Pre-load or prepare templates for holiday journeys, leverage decisioning logic (offers/constraints) so that you can dynamically adapt based on inventory, time-sensitive offers, and channel preference. See the example in the Add constraints to an offer article.

• Technical readiness: Confirm API/endpoint load capacity, throttle/capping rules for custom actions and external integrations. Refer to Guardrails and limitations.

Test and validate

• Use your experimentation framework to test key variable changes:

  • send time
  • offer type
  • channel mix
    Refer to AJO Experimentation Accelerator best practices.

• Conduct end-to-end journey validation:

  • event triggers
  • segmentation entry
  • journey path flows
  • personalization logic
  • offer constraints
  • exit criteria

• Verify capping and conflict rules. Refer to the Journey capping & arbitration article.

• Stress-test scaled volumes for peak sends or spikes: Simulate high trigger volumes to validate system behavior under load.

• Validate deliverability: Warm-up email domains/senders, confirm mobile push configurations, and check fallback channels for SMS/in-app.

Best practices

• Use omnichannel orchestration. Refer to the blog Essential omnichannel customer journeys for engagement and growth article that shows a holiday season example with AJO.
• Prioritize real-time triggers where appropriate. For example: cart abandon, browse abandon, and stock alerts, as holiday shoppers are more reactive.
• Leverage segmentation & personalization: Target high-intent segments, tailor offers based on past purchase behavior, and preferences.
• Minimal messaging fatigue: Enforce caps and quiet hours to avoid over-soliciting. Refer to the Elevate Customer Experience with Daily Frequency Capping in AJO blog post.
• Timing matters: Plan sends earlier in holiday window (given compressed season) and align channels to time-zones and local audience behavior.
• Offer dynamic/limited-time offers to create urgency, but coordinate across channels to avoid duplication and conflict.
• Use suppression logic: Suppress audiences who have just purchased, or apply post-purchase journeys to avoid redundant messaging.

Security and governance

• Ensure access control and permissions are configured so that only required users can deploy journeys or modify business rules.
• Monitor and enforce API call/connection capping: For example, see the Capping API | Adobe Journey Optimizer article.
• Use clean first-party data and ensure proper identity stitching so that messaging is customer-centric not duplicate/misaligned.
• Ensure deliverability domains are warmed, anti-spam measures are in place, especially for high-volume holiday sends.
• Review audit logs and journey changes frequently during peak season to detect mis-runs or errant journeys early.

Post-peak learns

• After peak loads, conduct a review of journey entry counts, suppression counts, opt-out rates, deliverability metrics, and channel performance.
• Clean up suppressed segments, and pause or retire journeys built for holiday window to avoid carry-over fatigue.
• Use insights from real-time performance to refine next year’s planning (For example: send time adjustments, channel mix, and message volume).

By proactively forecasting seasonal demand, configuring channels and rules, validating journey performance, and enforcing security and governance, organizations can ensure Adobe Journey Optimizer delivers seamless, personalized, and resilient customer experiences throughout this holiday season and beyond.

Customer Journey Analytics uses The 5 Ps to achieve holiday/peak season readiness.

Prepare for scale

• Review CJA connections and data views; establish which Connections and Data Views require enhanced monitoring and provisioning.
• Confirm provisioning is sufficient for holiday scale; upscale critical Connections and Data Views as needed. See Manage Connections for more information.

Monitor performance

• Leverage RAM (Reporting Activity Manager overview) to monitor active and queued reporting requests in real time, identify at-capacity connections, and spot bottlenecks.
• Watch for increased latency during peak load using the Errors And Troubleshooting Guide and Known Limitations articles.
• Empower admins to preemptively suspend or cancel long-running/blocked requests via RAM. Refer to the Cancel reporting requests in CJA article.

Best practices

• Schedule exports/reports during low-traffic periods to smooth load and minimize latency. Refer to the Scheduled reports article.
• Spread out Requests: Schedule reports at different intervals throughout the day.
• Reduce panels, simplify segments, shorten date ranges, and avoid excess concurrent jobs. See the Optimizing CJA Workspace Performance article for details.

Troubleshooting

• When troubleshooting workspace errors, refer to error messages for the cause and recommended actions; use RAM (Reporting Activity Manager) to clear bottlenecks and manage concurrency effectively. See CJA Workspace Error Handling for more details.
• Use RAM (Reporting Activity Manager in CJA) to pinpoint problematic users, queries, or projects; prioritize and terminate/cancel as needed.

Post-peak learns

• After the holiday/peak period, review performance & incident logs to evaluate the impact of the best practices provided.
• Review slow queries and user tasks to identify patterns/trends that can be optimized for the next season.
• Gather feedback from users and stakeholders—update your own runbooks and readiness plans using newly gained insights.
• Provide feedback to the Adobe teams via your Account team.

To ensure a successful peak season for your organization, it’s essential to prepare your Adobe Commerce digital storefront for high traffic.

Predict demand

• During the peak holiday sales period (mid-November through mid-January), Adobe recommends that all Adobe Commerce merchants hosted on our cloud infrastructure proactively plan for an increase in visitors by submitting Holiday surge capacity requests. See Holiday Surge Capacity Requests for Adobe Commerce on our cloud infrastructure for details.

Prepare for scale

Follow the recommendations in the Planning and pivoting: A strategic approach to peak season 2025 guide, which provides actionable strategies using Adobe Commerce (and optional Adobe Experience Cloud tools) to help you plan, pivot, and deliver outstanding customer experiences during the busiest time of year.

Best practices

• Follow Adobe’s guide How to prepare your infrastructure for high traffic — the 5 Ps of peak season performance.
• Check out Tech tips for Commerce holiday readiness for tips on how to prepare your infrastructure for high traffic, prevent downtime, and optimize performance in the holiday period.

The holiday season is rapidly approaching, and for many Adobe customers, this signifies the onset of peak sales periods. In our commitment to your success, we want to ensure that you are fully prepared for the upcoming surge in traffic.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Services

If your organization experiences its busiest moments during the holiday season, you may be contemplating how to optimize your Adobe Experience Manager site to accommodate peak traffic. Fortunately, with Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Services, your site is already equipped with the capability to auto-scale, ensuring a seamless experience for your visitors, no matter if there are sudden changes in traffic.

Prepare for scale

• For detailed insights and guidance on preparing for high traffic with Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Services, please refer to the following links:

  • CDN in AEM as a Cloud Service
  • AEM as a Cloud Service caching

• If you are an Ultimate Success customer and have recently shared volume forecast information with your Adobe Account Team, don’t worry about sending it through to us again, as we have a view already.

We are here to support you in every step of your journey. In case you have any questions or concerns, feel free to submit a support ticket.

To prepare for a marketing campaign in the holiday season, check the AEMaaCS User Guide: Introduction - Marketing campaign parameters documentation.

Security and governance

For information on AEM website traffic security/protection, see the Overview - Protecting AEM websites article in the AEM as a Cloud Service Tutorials.

Holiday maintenance planning

Adobe has scheduled maintenance exclusion periods to ensure uninterrupted service during critical holiday windows:

• No automatic updates will occur between:

  • November 24, 2025 – December 2, 2025
  • December 15, 2025 – January 2, 2026

This ensures stability during high-traffic periods. For full release schedules and maintenance windows, refer to the AEM release roadmap.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with Adobe Managed Services (AMS)

AEM customers leveraging Adobe Managed Services can work proactively with their CSEs to plan for the holidays’ coverage needs.

To ensure successful holiday campaigns with Adobe Marketo, teams should verify email authentication settings, clean and secure their database, optimize campaign logic and scheduling, thoroughly test email rendering and deliverability, and streamline support readiness for peak performance and engagement.

Prepare for scale

• Check your SPF/DKIM settings and ensure everything is still set up and working correctly. See the Set up SPF and DKIM for your Email Deliverability article for details.
• Audit and clean your Marketo database by purging inactive/invalid records. This will increase the chances that your sends land in the inboxes of your most sales ready leads. See the Marketo Database Health Check-up & How to Keep it Clean article for details.
• Confirm that your team members have the right permissions to perform tasks and prevent unintended access or changes to the emails. Whether you’re making changes through the Admin or through the Admin Console, we’ve got you covered. See the Managing User Roles and Permissions article.
• Review your Launchpad integrations to ensure correct authentication and resolve any potential errors before they are used. See the Marketo Developer Guide: Authentication article.

Best practices

Efficiency starts with understanding exactly how Marketo prioritizes and processes campaigns. Give your campaigns the gift of speed with these optimization tips.

• Understanding how Marketo prioritizes the processing of campaign flow steps is crucial to avoid inadvertently delaying any urgent or high priority emails. See the How Campaign Processing Works article.
• Being mindful of smart list logic helps ensure your campaigns execute quickly and at peak performance. See the Best Practices for Smart Lists article.
• Head Start or Recipient Time Zone can start building emails in advance of your send, reducing delays, and providing added prep time for qualifying leads with high-resource logic. See the Head Start for Email Programs and the Schedule Email Programs with Recipient Time Zone articles for details.
• Your campaign is active, and leads are flowing through, and then you notice a mistake with flow step. It’s tempting to fix with a quick adjustment, but being aware of what happens when you change a live wait step or reorder your flows can help you avoid a lot of headaches and clean-up later. See the Editing Campaign Flow with Members in Wait Steps article.

Test and validate

Before you hit Send, make sure that your emails look and perform exactly as intended.

• Marketo offers multiple ways to test an email’s appearance to make sure it looks exactly the way you envisioned it.

  • Use the Preview function to make sure that your dynamic content and tokens are rendered correctly by previewing by segmentation or individual leads. See the Preview an Email with Dynamic Content article.
  • Send a direct email to your test records quickly and easily to see how your email appears on different clients/devices. See the Run a Single Flow Step from a Smart List article.
  • For Litmus users, it’s now easier than ever to integrate your account and initiate rendering tests directly from the email editor. See the Test Email Rendering with Litmus article.

• Check out the Email spam report feature, which integrates with SpamAssassin to review your email’s content and assign a score on how likely it is to hit the inbox or be marked as spam. See the Email spam report article.

• Keep an eye on Campaign Queue to verify your campaigns are processing and prioritizing high urgency items correctly. See the Is My Campaign Running? article.

Streamline your support experience

When something goes wrong, speed matters, and Marketo Support is here to help! Include these details in your support case to avoid back and forth and help our team work towards a quicker resolution. See the Best Practices for Working With Marketo Support article.

With this guide, you can rest a bit easier knowing you’re starting from a strong position to drive engagement and conversions during this critical window. The stakes are high, but your stress doesn’t have to be. Start your preparations today and make this holiday season your most successful yet.

To prepare Adobe Workfront for the holiday season, teams should update support contacts, align internal schedules with Adobe, avoid major changes during peak windows, and proactively monitor automations and integrations to ensure smooth operations.

Prepare for scale

To help ensure a smooth support experience during the holidays:

• Review and update your authorized support contacts in advance.
• Validate that key stakeholders are available to collaborate with Support if critical issues arise.
• If planning product or workflow changes during the holiday window, consider scheduling them before mid-November or after early January for best turnaround times.
• Communicate internal holiday schedules to your Adobe contacts to ensure alignment.

Test and validate

Stay informed about Workfront releases and test new features in sandbox environments:

• Prepare for an Adobe Workfront release
• Workfront Release Notes Archive
• Q1 2025 Release Overview
• Workfront Release Webinar Recording

Best practices

• Proactive Planning: Identify any system dependencies or scheduled automations that may be impacted by internal time-off schedules.
• Continuous Communication: Keep your internal teams and Adobe Support informed of planned maintenance or key events.
• Use Dashboards: Monitor key integrations and automations to catch early signs of performance issues.
• Escalate Early: If you anticipate or observe service degradation, open a support ticket immediately — don’t wait for it to become critical.

By planning ahead, maintaining clear communication, and escalating issues early, organizations can minimize disruptions and ensure Workfront continues to support critical workflows throughout the holiday period.

To prepare Adobe Campaign for holiday readiness, teams should proactively validate deliverability settings, optimize audience segmentation and message frequency, ensure infrastructure scalability, and test cross-channel campaign orchestration to handle seasonal volume and engagement spikes effectively.

Expert tips to make your holiday campaigns stand out

Just like it’s never too early to start your holiday shopping, it’s never too early to start planning for a wildly successful holiday marketing campaign. With Adobe Campaign, you can design, plan, and execute campaigns that will make all your organization’s holiday wishes come true. But do you know all the tips for running campaigns that will finish the year out with a bang? Check this video, Expert tips to make your holiday campaigns stand out, that discusses deliverability and execution best practices and will show you how to do it all in Adobe Campaign.

Considerations and preparations for the holiday period

This video, Adobe Campaign: Holiday Readiness - Considerations and Preparations for the Holiday Period, covers:

• Engaging the Campaign community
• Deliverability – Considerations for the holidays and beyond!
• Technical Recommendations for Adobe Campaign Classic (ACC) & Adobe Campaign Standard (ACS)

To have Adobe Campaign ready for the holiday peak season, organizations should finalize deliverability checks, validate campaign configurations, and ensure scalable infrastructure and cross-channel orchestration are in place to confidently execute high-volume, time-sensitive campaigns throughout the holiday season.

As the holiday season approaches, organizations using Adobe Analytics should take proactive steps to ensure data accuracy, platform performance, and reporting reliability during peak traffic periods. Adobe provides several resources and best practices to help teams prepare effectively.

Predict traffic

To ensure adequate hardware allocation and system responsiveness, Adobe recommends submitting peak hourly and daily server hit/call volumes in advance.

• Check Traffic spike scheduling and hardware allocation lead times, as understanding how quickly data becomes available is critical for real-time decision-making during high-volume periods.

• Learn what impacts data availability and latency in Adobe Analytics in Adobe Analytics data latency overview, including unexpected traffic spikes and hardware issues, and discover recommended strategies to reduce data delays.

Best practices

For teams using data feeds to export raw analytics data, Adobe provides guidance on optimizing feed configurations and avoiding common pitfalls.

• Best practices for Adobe Analytics data feeds

To maintain fast and reliable reporting during the holidays, Adobe recommends:

• Optimizing Analysis Workspace performance
• Troubleshooting and best practices for Report Builder: Recommendations for optimizing requests
• Analytics Components Guide: Scheduled reports queue

Holiday maintenance planning

Adobe typically enforces maintenance exclusion windows during peak holiday periods to ensure uninterrupted service. Customers should monitor Adobe’s release and maintenance schedules via Experience League and coordinate with their Adobe account teams for support planning.

By following these guidelines and leveraging Adobe’s public documentation, organizations can ensure their Adobe Analytics implementation is robust, responsive, and ready for the demands of the holiday season.

The holiday season brings exciting opportunities for engagement, but it also comes with challenges like traffic surges and increased demand on personalization systems. To help you deliver seamless experiences during this critical period, we’ve compiled key recommendations to ensure your Adobe Target implementation is ready.

Predict demand

Start by anticipating traffic spikes of 20–50% or more and validating that your infrastructure can handle the load. Forecast activity and data volumes across Adobe Target, Analytics, and AEP to avoid surprises.

It’s also important to identify mission-critical journeys—such as checkout, product recommendations, and promotional offers—so personalization efforts focus where they matter most.

Refer to Best practices for optimization with Adobe Target.

Prepare for scale

• Plan for increased traffic on the website and mobile devices and inform the Target support team to increase server capacity to avoid any blocked calls.
• For any load/pen testing, Target support team should be informed in advance.
• Upgrade to the latest at.js/Delivery API versions.
• Freeze non-critical changes; prepare for fallback experiences.
• Align support and escalation processes and enable proactive alerts.

Test and validate

Validate content delivery using QA links to confirm everything works as expected. Use the Match audience rules to see experiences toggle to ensure the right audience qualifies for the activity you are testing. Double-check that your Goal Metric configuration is aligned to the Objective of the activity. And always have a backup plan ready — just in case.

Best practices

Keep your implementation within Adobe Target limits and verify GDPR and CCPA compliance in advance before launching. Maintain fewer than 100 active activities and archive older ones to keep things streamlined. Take advantage of Auto-Allocate/Auto-Target for AI-driven optimization. Establish rollback plans and real-time monitoring dashboards.

Security and governance

Before personalizing experiences, confirm consent compliance under GDPR and CCPA. Avoid storing personally identifiable information (PII) in profile parameters and validate API security to protect customer data.