Adobe Target adds more granular personalization features

Adobe Target, the personalization engine for the Adobe Experience Manager cloud platform, now includes new features that allow marketing teams to drive more granular offers across websites and mobile apps.

The first is "edge segmentation" with the Adobe Customer Data Platform (CDP). This feature ports real-time activity data -- such as a customer service call -- with customer segment audience data, which typically is older. The idea is to give Adobe Target users the ability to prevent serving customers ads or offers for products they've already bought, said Drew Burns, Adobe Target group product marketing manager.

The second feature enables more precise audience targeting by giving users more control over data modeling. Instead of taking all attributes of a customer into account when building audience segments, this feature lets users pare it back to fewer specific attributes before running audience analytics and A/B testing on their campaigns.

The third integrates Adobe Journey Optimizer orchestration with Adobe Target's testing tools to find out what offers will work across websites and mobile apps, and to push customers toward them. The integration includes a marketer-friendly interface that can place offers in a number of different locations, such as a side banner, homepage banner or pop-up, without code.

The features, taken together, are ways to combine CDP and data management platform (DMP) feeds that flow into Adobe Target, and also show how Adobe is deeply integrating its acquired point products into a coherent platform, said Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research. Users will be able to fine-tune personalization regardless of whether the marketing automation tech knows who a person is from first-party CDP data, or if they are anonymized from ad sources fed through a DMP.

Traditional digital marketing crutches such as cross-app tracking and third-party cookies have become problematic for marketers, who must now rely more on their own first-party data to fuel campaigns. But the DMP isn't dead yet, thanks to creative repurposing of features in applications like Adobe Target, Miller said.

"There is definitely a lot of convergence, and you're starting to see very specific applications of DMP-type technologies -- like Adobe Target -- that can feed intelligence into lots of different points of the experience continuum," Miller said.

One example of this, Miller said, could be when a marketer hits on a successful campaign among a segment of known customers from a pool of CDP data. Turning to Adobe Target, the marketer could use data from a DMP feed to create an anonymized lookalike audience -- and personalize based on similar characteristics such as gender, age, brand affinity or other profile data. Through A/B testing, they can then optimize the campaign with this new group of customers.

Burns said the personalization tools simplify complex technologies for marketers, who typically aren't programmers or data scientists.

"We built out AI-powered personalization capabilities that are unique in the market to do this number crunching for non-technical users and non-analysts to be able to evaluate the data and take action on the data in real time," Burns said.

The Adobe Target features will be released in conjunction with the Adobe Summit virtual user conference March 15-17.

The Adobe Target features that connect with the CDP as well as personalized offers across web and mobile with Journey Optimizer are available now. Precision targeting is planned for release within 90 days. All the new features come included at no extra charge with an Adobe Target license. 

Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.