Product Management Insight

• The activation of both known (PII) and anonymous user data is possible in a CDP
• Profiles have a much longer data retention period in a CDP
• A complete customer profile (historical, demographic) is maintained in a CDP

Core Elements of Real-Time CDP

• XDM Schema & Datasets: The XDM Schema describes the logical model of all data coming into Adobe Experience Platform and contains information about the identities used to build the id graph. Essentially, any data that will be activated by Real-Time CDP has to be mapped to the XDM schema format. Datasets are tied to a schema and collect data either sent either via streaming or batch format from various sources (E.g. Audience Manager, Analytics, 3rd party sources) into AEP. 

• Real-time Customer Profile: The Real-time Customer Profile is a combined view of all customer identities collected across multiple channels. I recently wrote about the device graph which creates a holistic view of the customer across multiple touch points. Real-Time CDP taps into the device/id graph to create a unified view of both the known and unknown customer profile on the fly depending on the use case.

• Real-Time Web Data Streaming: The introduction of the AEP Web SDK has changed the dynamics of how Adobe data collection will happen moving forward. This essentially allows clients to send data directly to AEP in real-time as well as to Analytics, Audience Manager and Target from our website or mobile app. A lot of new content is being created on this which I'll share soon.

• Real-Time Activation of Profiles: Real-Time CDP allows us to send segments and PII profiles to external destinations quickly keeping in mind the rapid pace at how customers can interact with brands across multiple channels. 

• Built With Privacy By Design: All Adobe products including Real-Time CDP is built keeping privacy in mind. In case of the AEP UI, customers can use Data Usage Labeling and Enforcement (DULE) labels to mark mark identities or restrict how data will be activated based on GDPR and other privacy laws. The official Adobe documentation provides more details on this.

Adobe Solution Integration with Real-Time CDP

Real-Time CDP UI Overview

Profiles

A profile is a collection of an individual or entity which can be used to uniquely identify it. In this screenshot, the profile is tied to the ECID identity but there can be additional identities for this profile such as email address, phone number to name a few. This is embedded within the Adobe Experience Platform UI.

Segments

The segmentation UI for Real-Time CDP is the same interface which AEP uses and it looks very similar to the Segment Builder UI embedded in Adobe Analytics. Segments allow us to dissect very large amount of profiles into smaller and much more manageable chunks. 

Sources

Destinations

• Profile Export which allows us to export PII data to ESPs and other platforms. 
• Segment Export (anonymous) which allows us to export profiles which qualified for a segment to Demand Side Platforms and is similar to how Audience Manager exports data to DSPs. 

Triggers Architecture with Adobe I/O

The steps till #7 in this diagram are almost the same as any regular Triggers lifecycle which I covered in my previous post so here, I'll cover everything from step 8 onwards. If some steps are not clear, don't worry as I will cover these in more detail later in the post. So, let's walk through these in more detail:

8a - A user subscribes to the Triggers API using Runtime by creating a webhook. A prerequisite is to subscribe to the Triggers API which is done in the Admin console (covered later).
8b - The webhook is registered in the Adobe Admin console which is validated by the Event Gateway.
9a - The Analytics Trigger is sent to I/O Events as soon as the trigger is executed (E.g. cart abandonment, some page is viewed etc.).
9b - I/O Events sends the Trigger JSON payload to the client which is collected at some endpoint leveraging Runtime via a POST request.
9c - A Runtime action is invoked  as a custom event to send the JSON payload to a 3rd party Email Service Provider (ESP). Please note Adobe Campaign will automatically receive the JSON payload (step 7).
10 - Runtime action is invoked to query data and receive the output.
11 - This output is sent to an SFTP location to Adobe Campaign or other ESPs via another action. 
12- ESP sends an email or SMS tied to the trigger payload and conditional logic.
13 - User clicks on the email and is routed back to the site.

Listen for I/O Events Via a Webhook

Setup ngrok

Create a Webhook "Listening" Server

Register Webhook in Admin Console

Create and Test Your Trigger

Aside from the Triggers UI, I can also see five Trigger events posted on the app.js page actively listening for the events. Based on my test, it took the between 20-30 seconds for me to receive the webhook (see below) and I got 5 triggers (POST requests).

Parse the Trigger POST Response

Finally, you can parse the trigger response by expanding the POST request. In the JSON response, we can see that there are two main components of the call where the first one has information about the timestamp, IMS org among others and the second one is the actual analyticsHitSummary payload that contains all the "enriched" data from Adobe Analytics. Please note that a valid use case for this would be to send this to a 3rd party Email Service Provider given that Adobe Campaign receives it automatically. Please note that the customer ID (used to link ACS with a customer ID) captured on your site needs to be sent in an eVar as part of the Payload.

BONUS: Send a Slack Message When a Trigger Occurs

Enable Incoming Webhook for Slack

In this step, we will integrate our webhook with Slack to send a Trigger response to a Slack channel when an event occurs. You can do that by going here which is the regular process. In my case, I went here and added this app to my Slack workspace and channel called #trigger-channel.

Once you complete the integration, you'll receive your Slack Webhook URL which looks like this: https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Once the integration is complete, you can send a POST request to the hook and post a custom message like I did via Postman. 

Once it's done, you'll see a bunch of messages stating the the integration is setup including a "Hello World" message which I sent. 

Next, I'll show you how to enable Slack to receive your Triggers webhook.

Modify Code In app.js

Modify the app.js file and update your webhook URL and channel name.

Next, we'll modify the Triggers payload to customize what we want to send to our Slack channel. In my case, I want to display my ECID and URL which I've slightly modified in the script written by the Adobe I/O team.

Monitor Triggers in Slack

Finally, we can see that we got 5 Trigger responses in our Slack channel as well like we saw in the Triggers UI and the ngrok "listening" page. Again, not sure if this a good use case for Slack but you can use the model for other use cases which are more pertinent. 

So, that was it! Hope you found this helpful for your own use case on how to use I/O Events. Are you using Adobe I/O in any form today?

Use Case

Deploy the AAM Pixels in Campaign Standard

AAM Impression Pixel (HTML)

AAM Click Pixel (Email Designer)

Follow the steps laid out in this Adobe article to personalize the links. I will show a simple example of how to do that but will not really include it for my example. 

Select the "Get Started" CTA and click on the pencil icon to to add a URL. 

In the editor, I've added a click pixel where I've included the d_rd (Mandatory redirect URL) parameter which redirects you the landing page URL that needs to be encoded. Also, note that I've added a personalization field as an example so if you have a user ID, you can add it to the pixel as shown below. Finally, I've also added a custom query string parameter called "m_source" which you can track on your landing page in an eVar if you use Adobe Analytics or leverage the utm parameters if you use Google Analytics.

Send the Email

Validate the AAM Pixels

Validate in Campaign Standard

Validate Impression Pixel in Microsoft Outlook

Validate Email Pixels in Audience Manager

The next step is to validate the email pixels in AAM. We created two traits tied to impression and click and both show that I qualified for each of the traits.

Validate Email Clicks in Analytics Solution

The final step is to validate how many users actually land on your site which will be users who click on the email. In my case, I have Google Analytics tagged on my blog so I've included a quick example but in hindsight, I should've leveraged the utm parameters as I'm using GA but you can capture this query param in your Campaign ID variable.

So that's the extent of the various steps involved in tracking AAM email pixels in Adobe Campaign Standard.

Additional Things to Consider

Overview of Triggers

• Abandonment (Send an email or SMS after a gap of between 10 minutes to 2 hours)
• Actions (Send an email or SMS if a particular action is performed on the site)
• Session Start (Send an email or SMS if an action occurred at the start of a session)
• Session End (Send an email or SMS if an action occurred at the end of a session)

Few Considerations While Using Triggers

• We can create up to 100 Triggers.
• We cannot bring in any calculated metrics or segments created in Adobe Analytics.
• There's no way to select a Visitor container like we can in the Analytics Segment UI.
• Values from Adobe Analytics reporting don't automatically populate in the dropdown menu when we use the "Equal" operator.
• For Products or other dimensional data, there's no way to know which particular product has been added to the cart etc. so all the data is sent as it comes in. Prior manipulation of data will have to done to specify exactly which product was sent.
• The conditional logic to create Triggers can get really cumbersome and there's a lot of flexibility provided around boolean logic and Containers provided in the Triggers UI.

Common Use Cases For Triggers 

• Abandonment (Time Bound)

• A user abandons the cart or form and needs to be contacted within 10 minutes
• A user signs up for an offer and you need to send a confirmation email
• Notify of a shipment or password reset
• A user purchases a product

• A user views a promotional video
• A user completes a survey 
• Personalize email to show last product viewed
• Confirm when a prospect opts-in for a newsletter

• Session Start and End-I haven't used these yet

• A user visits a campaign landing page after clicking on an ad
• A user did not sign up for a form and exited the site

Triggers Provisioning

Email the Digital Request Alias

• Marketing Cloud Company Name 
• IMS ORG ID
• Analytics Login Company (could be same as marketing cloud company name)

Map Report Suites to the Experience Cloud Org

Enable Triggers in the Admin Console

Create Data Sources

Sync the Hashed User IDs with the Experience Cloud

Common Access Issues

This is an issue which I'm currently facing for a client where I'm unable to create an authenticated Customer ID Data Source. I had to log an internal ticket to get this resolved.

Simplified Integration Architecture