Adobe Target and Adobe Journey Optimizer Coexistence - I
In the last few months, I have been working with a customer on a topic that is becoming more and more common. No one questions the power of personalization, but now we have a conflict to resolve: what happens when you combine Adobe Target (AT) and Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) offers on the same page?
A Bit of Background
There is little to no overlap in the scope of most Adobe Experience Cloud tools:
- Although the names are similar, Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) are worlds apart.
- You can create a website with Adobe Commerce, but if you have AEM, you will likely use the latter.
- AT has its own reporting capability, but if you have Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics, we prefer to use one of these analytics tools for A4T reporting.
However, with the release of AJO offers, its web capabilities compete directly with AT.
I will be referring to AJO offers generically. For completeness, AJO has two engines, the legacy Offer Decisioning Engine, now renamed as Decision Management, and the new Experience Decisioning, also known as Decisioning. I know, Adobe could have done a better job in naming these two features. I will not differentiate between the two in this post, as the differences do not change the explanations. I also assume that only one of these two AJO offer engines is in use. I strongly recommend against using both simultaneously; here be dragons.
Finally, if you want a different perspective from mine, my coworker Sarvesh has a post on LinkedIn on the same topic.
The Problem
While AT was designed for the web, and it can also be used in mobile apps, AJO offers can be used in any channel that can make API calls. I know, I know, you could, in theory, use AT rawboxes for email open-time personalization, but who uses them these days?
If you have been following so far, you will have noticed that on the web, we can potentially have AT experiences and AJO offers simultaneously. Per se, this is not a problem. However, nothing prevents you from configuring an AT experience and an AJO offer to be shown on exactly the same placement. AJO and AT have no way to communicate in the backend to detect a collision. I do not expect this capability to be built, so we have a conflict to resolve. I would even argue that it is impossible. As a consequence, we have to resolve this collision externally.
Let’s explore what solutions we have at hand.
Mutual Exclusivity
The simplest solution is also the most obvious: use one or the other on a given page, never both at the same time. The most common approach is to use AT on publicly-facing pages, and AJO offers on the private section of the website.
On the one hand, the public section of a website is open to everyone. Most visitors will be anonymous, so you will not have a profile for them that you can use to show them an offer. AT is at its best in this scenario, from A/B testing to Recommendations.
On the other hand, the private section requires authentication. You can now access a profile and use AJO offers to find the best content for the visitor.
The benefits of this approach are obvious:
- Simple governance.
- Separation of concerns.
- Predictability.
- Attribution in AT will be more accurate.
Activity Type Separation
One drawback of the previous solution is that you cannot run A/B tests on the private section of your website. In order to enable this capability, you could take one of the following two approaches.
On the public section of the website, you continue using AT only. Nothing changes here. However, on the private section, you allow AT for A/B testing, and only A/B testing. AJO offers still show offers in the private section. It goes without saying that A/B tests should not be performed in locations where AJO offers are shown.
A slightly different approach is to use AT for A/B testing and AJO offers for personalization everywhere on the website. Again, you will have to define where you can run personalization campaigns and where to run A/B tests, and keep these areas mutually exclusive.
The main advantage of this solution is that you can now run A/B tests everywhere on the web. However, you have to define the boundaries between AT and AJO offers carefully.
Since this post is already quite long, I will continue in the next post.
Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash