Articles by category: MSA

Today I am going to diverge from the typical, more technically-oriented posts I have written in the last few months. Most of the companies I have worked with in the last 5+ years had the same issue: different Adobe tools where used by different and disconnected teams. Although this seems like an obvious issue, I wanted to put it in writing.

As I explained in my EMEA Summit lab, you should not use the ECID server-side if you are in a web environment. The solution I proposed was to use a hybrid approach. This means that the ECID must still be generated client-side, and then used server-side.

I will be conducting a lab at the Adobe EMEA Summit. I will show how to implement Server-side Digital Marketing on Thursday at 14:00. If you want to know more about it, please join me! If you are at Summit, but cannot attend my lab, I will be at the Adobe stand most of the time. See you there!

Welcome back to another basic post about the Adobe Experience Cloud. One of the main pillars of any web analytics tool is the visitor identification. It is not only used for the visitors metric, but also as the basis of multiple other features in tools like Target and Audience Manager.

After a few weeks delay, I am resuming the multi-tenancy in the Adobe Experience Cloud series of posts. I had an issue with my internal sandbox, which prevented me from showing how to set up multi-tenancy in Adobe Target. I got it fixed this week and I am ready to show it to you. Let’s start!

The User-Agent parameter is a piece of information that all browsers attach to all HTTP(S) requests they make. In today’s post, I will demystify this HTTP parameter and explain how it works. There will be a second part, where I will explain how this parameter is used in Adobe products.

Adobe Target segments are probably the richest among the SaaS tools of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Target itself has segmentation capabilities, but it can also use segments coming from multiple other sources. Here you will see how to use all of them.

Now that I have clarified the data sources in Audience Manager, I can explain how to manage multi-tenancy in Audience Manager. If you have not read that post, please do so before proceeding with this one. But if you have, let’s get started!

A few weeks ago I introduced the concept of multi-tenancy in the Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Analytics has had support for multi-tenancy for a very long time. Recently, all user administration for Adobe Analytics has been moved to the Admin Console, where you now configure everything. Read on if you want to know how to configure multi-tenancy in Adobe Analytics with this new setup.

It is not too uncommon that you need to have multiple tenants in the Adobe Experience Cloud. Although it was not explicitly designed to support this feature, it is possible to achieve it. I must admit it is not straight forward, but not difficult either. I will start with an introduction to multi-tenancy and, in future posts, I will explain the details for each solution.

We are all familiar with the client-side debugging tools, from the old DigitalPulse debugger to Charles. However, as Tim asked me some time ago, how do we debug server-side implementations? It is not always easy, but you have various options. Let’s explore them.

[UPDATE 12/05/2019] There are some limitations, which I have added towards the bottom So, after reading my introduction to server-side digital marketing, you have deeply thought about it and now you are convinced that you should be going server-side. As with the JavaScript implementation, the first step you need is to get the Experience Cloud ID, or ECID for short (new name for the MCID). I assume you have a good understanding of the HTTP protocol, as this is going to be a more technical post.

A few weeks ago I read a great blog post entitled The Era of Server-side Everything from my colleague Jan Exner. I wanted to write a comment, but as I started to think about what to write, I realised it was going to be too long. Instead, I decided I would write my own post on this topic. Then, as I started to think what I would include, additional blog posts came to my mind. So, this is the first of a series of posts on server-side digital marketing.

I am sure you have been hearing a lot about Adobe Sensei lately. This technology was announced in November 2016, but only in the last few months it has become more mainstream. In summary, Adobe Sensei is Adobe’s approach to artificial intelligence. In this post, I would like to provide a brief introduction to this new Adobe offering. I am not an expert in these technologies, but if you have heard of these technologies and are wondering about them, this post will shed some light.

I am sure we have all been concerned about security in the last decade or more. However, since 2013, after the revelations of Edward Snowden, we have begun to be really worried about it. It comes to no surprise that Adobe tools need to be secure too. In the end, you are pouring your marketing data there. I am not a security expert, so always get independent advice. However, in this post I will give an introduction to some security considerations concerning the Adobe stack.

If you keep information about your customers, you need a database to store it. The first solution that probably comes to your mind is a CRM, but this is not the only option. As you know, Adobe does not offer a solution to store customer data, but there are many integration points between Adobe solutions and this database. Let’s see how to use your customer data in the Adobe ecosystem and some additional details to take into account.

Server-side integrations have many benefits, which I am not going to enumerate. If you can choose between server-side and client-side integrations, I would generally recommend server-side. However, there is always one drawback: debugging. You cannot see what happens between the servers. This is the case of the Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager integration. I have personally had to debug it a few times and this is how you can do it.

In large projects, one of the typical questions I get asked is: should we use one Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC) or multiple? Unfortunately, there is no black or white answer here, but many shades of grey. However, in the end, you have to choose one option and this decisions is final. Let me share with you some tips to choose wisely.

The Profiles & Audiences core service has two main components: Customer Attributes (the “profiles” part) and the Audience Library (the “audiences” part). Today I am going to focus on the latter, which is also called Real-Time Audiences. As its name implies, it allows you to create audiences, for which visitors qualify in real time.

[UPDATE 21/10/2018] The Profiles & Audiences core service has been renamed as People core service. Everything else stays the same. When the Adobe Marketing Cloud was rolled out, it included some new features, which were not part of any individual solutions. These features were called Core Services. One of these features was Customer Attributes, part of the Profiles & Audiences core service. If you do not have an AAM license, it can be very useful in a few use cases. Let’s see how to set Customer Attributes up.