Articles by category: MSA

Being able to identify your customer as they browse your websites within the Adobe Experience Cloud solutions brings lots of additional features. However, it is not as easy as it initially looks like. This customer identification process is a bit complex and I will explain here what you need to do.

If you have been keeping up with the news of the Adobe Marketing Experience Cloud, you will probably have heard the word “triggers” quite a lot lately. My colleague Mathieu Hannouz conducted an excellent presentation, in which he explained this new feature. In case you do not know what triggers are, this post is for you.

[UPDATE] Since I wrote this post, the services has been renamed as ECID (Experience Cloud ID Service). Other than the name, everything stays the same. The Marketing Cloud ID (MCID) Service enables most Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to uniquely identify a visitor. It is the basis of the people identification, as I explained a few weeks ago. But it does not stop here; it provides the foundations for the People core service (aka Profiles and Audiences), which, in turn, provides customer attributes and shared audiences.

I must admit it: I love cookies. I can eat one cookie pack in a couple of days. Therefore, I try to keep my kitchen free of cookies. However, this is not what I am going to explain here. Today I am going to take a step back and, instead of advanced topics, I want to review a basic concept: cookies. I know most of you know fairly well what cookies are. However, if you are still trying to get your head around cookies, I recommend you keep on reading. You might also find useful ideas to explain cookies to other people.

Imagine the following situation. You are working as a Multi Solution Architect, specialised in the Adobe Marketing Cloud. A big company, which has never used Adobe’s products, has purchased most or all Adobe Marketing Cloud products. Your task is to lead the implementation of the project and put together all products in a way that delivers maximum benefits for the customer. What do you do next?

[UPDATE 29/10/2017] As Javier has pointed out and after some internal checks, there is no destination any more nor any mappings. Nothing is wrong with it, as it will still work as expected. Just ignore the section “Check mapping in AAM”. Thanks Javier! Adobe is now selling a Marketing Cloud. You can still get a license for individual products, but the moment you have two or more, you should connect them together. Today I am going to explain how you should connect Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Target. The use case is very simple: you want to use AAM segments to create personalisations through Target. And you want this segment sharing to happen in real time: as soon a user qualifies for a segment in AAM, you want to be able to use it in Target.

[UPDATE 19/11/2022] I recently revisited this post, which was written 6 years ago, and realized that it is no longer valid. I am keeping it for historical reasons, but you should not follow it. I believe that this provisioning is currently done automatically. Some screenshots and links are also obsolete. In a previous post, I explained what Analytics for Target (A4T) was and how to use it. However, I did not explain how to get provisioned for A4T. In this post, I will explain what you need to request the provisioning for shared audiences and A4T. Although these two features are different, the provisioning form is the same. In fact, you can request both at the same time. One word of caution. I am not going to explain here what are the consequences of this provisioning. Therefore, only place this request once you know you need any of the two features (or both). Otherwise, I would suggest you refrain from requesting them, just for the sake of having them.

One of the buzzwords in the Adobe Marketing Cloud environment for the last year or so has been “Analytics for Target” or A4T for short. It basically means using Adobe Analytics as the reporting tool for Adobe Target activities/campaigns. Why so much excitement about it? If you are optimising/personalising the website with Adobe Target and you have presented your reports to other people in your organisation, and these other people have access to Adobe Analytics, I am sure you have received the following question: why does the visitor count not match between the two tools? Typically, the first answer that comes to mind is that Adobe products are broken. I wonder how many Adobe customers have raised a ticket through client care. The answer requires a bit of understanding: each tool counts the visitors differently and there is a reason for that.

There is an emerging role in the digital marketing landscape: the multi solution architect, or MSA for short. You have probably heard of these forecasts about the labour market of the future, when X% of the job titles do not exist today. I would say that the MSA is one of those new jobs. Two years ago, nobody talked about it. Last year, I could see some need for it, at least in Europe. Now, some of my customers explicitly request one. I can even state that I received a job offer a few months ago for exactly this role.