Sharing my experience as an Adobe consultant

20 Dec 2020

2020 Retrospective

My colleague Jan Exner has the habit of writing a retrospective in his last post of the year. He is not the only one, Datanalyst.info has done it from time to time. I have never written any such post, but I think it is a good idea. This is my first attempt. Hope you like it!


Many years ago, my grandmother told me that she did not understand why I received a salary for spending the whole day behind a computer. In comparison, my grandfather had been a captain in cargo ships and a pilot. Although I did not ask her what troubled her, I assumed that, for her, a computer was just another machine and mainly for gaming. To make money, you had to do “something”.


22 Nov 2020

Event serialisation

As I explained in my post on metrics and and dimensions in Adobe Analytics, events (or custom events) are the way to track metrics. In general, you want a metric to increase or decrease depending on the user’s behaviour. However, you may only want it to happen under certain circumstances. More importantly, you do not want to write complex code to manage that.


A year ago I wrote about Declared IDs. I briefly mentioned then an issue that arises with setting these IDs: lazy loading and Adobe Target. However, I know that I did not explain too much about the issue. In this post I will get into more detail.


In my previous post I explained what dimensions and metrics are in general, with a hint of how web analytics have interpreted them. In today’s post, I will address the next step: how Adobe Analytics has implemented these concepts.


When I started working with Adobe Analytics almost 10 years ago, before I joined Adobe, nobody explained me some web analytics basics. People mentioned concepts like dimensions and metrics and, initially, I did not understand them. In this post I will explain how I visualise these concepts, which helped me understand them. It may help you if you are in a similar situation or you see others having trouble grasping them.


27 Sep 2020

Look-alike modelling

In one of my first blog posts I mentioned look-alike modelling in AAM. However, I did not explain this concept in detail back then and I think it is high time I amend this omission. I will also show how to configure it and use its output.


In part 1 of this series, I explained the reason why we need a new tool. To summarise, there was no solution in the market that could be used in digital marketing with a true 360-degree view of the customer. In this post, I will explain the main core components of the Adobe Experience Platform.


If you have been using Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) tools lately, you will have heard more than a few times the new kid in town, the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). I first heard about it 3 years ago, when it was just an initial idea. Now it is with us and I am sure many do not yet understand it.


16 Aug 2020

Shoes

The English expression put (oneself) in (someone’s) shoes has similar versions in many languages around the world. In the case of Spanish, for example, instead of “shoes”, we say “skin”. The older I grow, the more important I find this idiom. Personally, I think that, in order to be successful in life, you need to think about it every time you interact with others. It applies to every aspect of life but, since this blog is about digital marketing, let’s concentrate on this area.


A long time ago I wrote about the Admin Console and I left some topics for a later post. The most important of these topics is related to how you provide different permissions to different users. This is what product profiles and user groups are for.


Server-side Target seems to be a recurring topic. I have written a few times about it. However, I have been guilty of keeping the posts very technical. Lately, I have received more questions about it and I want to clarify some important, non-technical aspects from this type of implementation.


One of the most requested features of DTM was the capability to load it asynchronously. Other tag managers offered this capability for a long time. Finally, Launch included this capability and I will explain below how to enable and use it.


When we talk about the Adobe Exprience Cloud (AEC), we tend to ignore a part of it. Some weeks ago I wrote about the typical AEC solutions, but I skipped on purpose three of them: Advertising Cloud, Magento and Marketo. If you were waiting to hear about them, here you have the details of the smaller siblings of the AEC.


31 May 2020

GDPR - 2 years on

Two years ago, on 25/05/2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) started to be applicable in the EU. Although this regulation entered into force 2 year earlier, in 2016, it caught many companies by surprise. Initially, there was panic around it. Some even thought that it would send ripples all along the Internet, which would change forever. Has this really happened?


A few years ago I wrote a post on business vs technology. Since in our world, 3 years is a very long time and now I have more experience on the matter, I decided to write about it again. It is not just an extension of the previous post, but a new angle to it. You probably have guessed that I am a bit (or more than a bit) tired of this confrontation.


Today I want to give an overview of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Now that I think about it, I should have done it a long time ago. I just got into the habit of explaining how to solve individual problems, that I never actually thought about the bigger picture. So, if you are familiar with the whole Adobe Experience Cloud or are looking for specific solutions to certain issues, you better skip this post. On the other hand, if you came here trying to understand what the Adobe suite of tools is about, this is for you.


I know that this is a moniker that has become very popular lately. You probably have heard it from Shantanu Narayen, but he is not the only one. Initially, I did not pay enough attention to this expression. But I guess something has clicked in my brain and I am finally processing it.


The typical destination of Adobe Audience Manager segments are DSPs. However, there are two other types of destinations. I have already written about cookie-based destinations. The other one is URL-based destinations. This name should not confuse you. It is actually, setting pixels dynamically, but only when you qualify for a segment.


I am sure you have heard the saying May you live in interesting times. Well, in case you wanted to know how these “interesting times” look like, we are now all living one of those. If you have been following my blog, it is not about medicine, so I will not give you any advice on health. I am more interested in how this crisis will affect those of us living in the digital marketing world. My intention with this post is to be some sort of forum, where we can all share our ideas. I will start with my view and I would like to read yours.