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.

In my previous post, I explained how to use Adobe Analytics in mobile apps, as there are many similarities between web and apps. However, there are very clear differences, like the fact that an app is installed in a mobile device and a web is not. This gives the SDK the opportunity to capture additional metrics and dimensions in what we call lifecycle metrics. You might also see them named as mobile metrics and dimensions.

After adding the app to Adobe Mobile Services and including the SDK in the mobile app project, the fun starts. Now you can start using the full power of the Adobe Experience Cloud in your app. Let’s start by capturing the user’s behaviour, so you can analyse it in Adobe Analytics. This is very similar to what a web analyst would do with the web.

So you have started developing an app and you want to use your existing Adobe license. You have already added it to Adobe Mobile Services. Now, it is time to add the Adobe Mobile SDK to your application and configure it.

In this fast-changing world we are living in, we tend to concentrate too much on the details and forget about the big picture. As, probably, many of you, I started by just thinking on how to solve the particular questions my customers had. One day, though, I had one of those enlightenment moments and I started to think in use cases instead. Let me explain you my journey until I realised how important the use cases are.

After the introduction from my last post, this on will focus on how to add an app to mobile services. I know there are a lot of details to be configured when adding an app, so I will try to clarify the settings and guide you how to add your own app.

In most of my posts, I refer mainly to the Adobe Experience Cloud applied to the web. I have written a few posts on mobile apps, but I have not yet written an introduction to Adobe Mobile Services. In my experience, it has surprised me the lack of knowledge there is about what you can do with an app. Today I will explain how to use the Adobe Experience Cloud with mobile apps.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you should already have a data layer in your websites. OK, maybe that is too harsh; however, at least, you should have a plan to put one in place. Once you have a good data layer, the next step I recommend is that you deploy a message bus.

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.

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.

When I started consulting for Adobe Analytics, I remember I had to explain a few times what the basic analytics metrics are. Once you get used to them, you do not realise it can be difficult to first understand them. So, if you are starting with your web analytics career and are still wondering what exactly a visitor, a hit or a visit is, this blog post is for you.

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.

Optimisation and personalisation in the Web is something all digital marketers do (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?!). Web technologies allow a great deal of flexibility, whereas mobile apps are very rigid. This is probably the reason why mobile apps optimisation and personalisation still infrequent.

One trend that I have seen in the last few years is the interest of my customers in getting the raw data out of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. More and more corporations are hiring data analysts and these people want all the data they can get. Using various tools (R, Hadoop, Data Workbench…), it is possible to dig deeper into the data to uncover hidden gems or create more sophisticated reports. Today I will explain the raw data from Adobe Analytics, the clickstream data feed.

[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.

Processing rules are basic if-then-else statements to perform minor manipulations of the data. They were added mainly to map context data variables into Analytics variables. However, you can also use them in simple cases instead of a VISTA rule. With processing rules, you can concatenate, copy or set values in Analytics variables. They must not be confused with Marketing Channels processing rules, which are specific for Marketing Channels.

When I was following the Adobe Audience Manager training, I remember that one of the topics I found most difficult to understand was ID syncing. The enablers spent a lot of time using these words and I could see that it was a key part of any Data Management Platform (DMP). Once I finally understood what it meant, I felt relieved. Today I will explain this concept, in case you are also stuck.

One of the main challenge, if not the most important, of digital marketing is to be able to identify real people. This is the key to marketing objectives like “360-degree view of the customers” or “single view of consumers”. The problem is that web analytics tools track only visitors, so we need to find a way to be able to perform this people identification. Let me explain what options do we have.