Showing posts with label Adobe Target. Show all posts

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Multi-Org Adobe Target and AEM Experience Fragment Integration and Governance Ideas

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target integration is one of the most powerful and robust in the Adobe Experience Cloud. I wrote about some of the benefits of this integration back in 2019. In this post, I want to cover two topics within the context of these two solutions:

Cross-IMS Org integration between AEM and Target
General Target workspace governance and XF nomenclature ideas

AEM & Target Cross-IMS Org Integration

This is one topic I never got a clear answer to unless I tried and tested it myself. A well known fact about IMS orgs is that we cannot integrate solutions across which is absolutely true when it comes to the Adobe Experience Cloud Visitor ID among other solution but in this case, it is possible to integrate AEM with different Adobe Target instances via Adobe I/O. Having said this, I must also mention that it's not very common for us to see given most companies have a single Target instance but there are some Adobe customers that have multiple Target instances and orgs.

I've included the steps I took to set this up where I tested this using a single AEM author and two Target instances across two IMS orgs. Let's a closer look:

In AEM (6.5.x), go to Security - > Adobe IMS Configurations and either click on an existing Target integration or create a new one. In this case, I already have two integrations set up with two Target instances (2 IMS orgs).

The first few steps are outlined in the next two screenshots which is key where we first need to generate the public certificate/key in AEM.

The next step is to upload the public key (called AEM-Adobe-IMS.crt) generated in AEM in the Adobe I/O console to integrate AEM with Target. I did this twice by uploading the public keys for both IMS configurations separately into each of the Adobe I/O consoles per IMS org.

You can follow the rest of the steps to set this up in Adobe's official documentation here and once it's set up, you can test the connection for both IMS orgs.

The final step is to connect to each Target instance and send Experience Fragments (XF) separately to both Target instances (and workspaces) in different IMS orgs.

Adobe Target Workspace and AEM XF Governance

This is another important topic that a lot of customers often ask about that's tied to best practices around creating a standardized process for organizing and naming workspaces and XFs in Target and AEM respectively. I previously wrote about a slightly similar topic about creating a segmentation governance strategy in AAM.

A colleague of mine Ryan Lillis took the first pass at the Target workspace governance strategy so want to give credit where it's due and a lot of these concepts are also covered in Adobe Target's official enterprise permissions documentation so I highly recommend you review it.

Before we can set governance in any solution, it's important for us to understand the concepts of user access in any solution. I'm not going to explain each of the user roles or the core access functionality in Target (covered in great depth in the documentation) but I have taken a stab to visualize WHAT the users are given access to in Target.

As you can see, the "Default Workspace" in Target has access to all Target properties and any additional workspaces do not have access to Target properties by default so you will have to manually add them to the workspace. This is an important concept as in AEM 6.5, you can share Experience Fragments directly to Target workspaces.

Target Workspace Governance

Here are some options for you to consider when you're deciding your Target workspace strategy:

Workspaces by Brand: This works well in companies that have multiple brands and each business group operates differently.
Workspaces by Geography/Locale: This works well in companies that have multiple country sites/implementations/teams.
Workspaces by Environment: Workspaces are tied to each unique site environment like Dev, QA, Stage etc. This is getting more and more common as more companies start sending XFs to these environments for testing before a launching to production.
Hybrid Workspaces: This typically works well for a large companies that are organized by various functions but eventually, it always makes sense to formalize it based on some fundamental construct.

It's also important to note that a company's organizational structure (divisional vs functional etc.) can also dictate how the workspaces are laid out but it's not very common as not every department necessarily has a testing program.

Experience Fragment Nomenclature Ideas

I've seen examples where XFs are named as "XF1" to something which is well structured like "Site:Location:Offer".

In my experience, a good XF nomenclature has a delimited set of values that have a predefined logic to it and I'm only referring to cases where they're meant to be shared with a Target workspace. Some examples are:

XFs based on Brand: <brand>:home:summercampaign
XFs based on Geography: en-us:home:springcampaign
XFs based on Environment: <dev/stage>:home:wintercampaign
Hybrid XFs: <brand>:en-us:home:fallcampaign:20%off

These examples are probably oversimplified and generic but the main point I'm trying to make is that it's important to add some sort of structure to how XFs are named as we want to minimize any confusion and redundancy when these land up as offers in Adobe Target. The other important point is that both the developers in AEM and Target users should align on these before applying these widely to save time.

Even though Target has robust filtering capabilities for offers (and others), this is how XFs will look in Target if the two groups won't align which in this example, shows inconsistency.

So, that was it! Hope you found this topic helpful. Please feel free to share with me your ideas on workspace organization or XF nomenclature best practices that you've seen work well.

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Marketo Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions

The Experience Cloud ID service consists of many solution integrations which I've written about in the past. The true value of the Experience Cloud ID service come to the fore with the various integrations that exist helping client really realize the true value of their investment in Adobe technology. A relatively newer addition to the Experience Cloud ecosystem is Marketo which was acquired by Adobe a few years ago for its rich cross-channel activation and marketing automation capabilities primarily in the B2B space but Marketo can be leveraged for B2C use cases as well.

I know that doesn't do justice to how powerful Marketo really is so here's a high-level overview of some of its capabilities especially around marketing automation:

To start off, let's start by understanding what marketing automation is. It is a technology that automates the measurement and orchestration of omnichannel marketing initiatives. It simplifies lead management & nurturing, event marketing, personalization, regular & triggered emails or SMS. I have worked extensively in the automotive vertical in the past and know how crucial it is for automotive companies or any other company to manage their leads throughout the customer journey starting from awareness to purchase. Marketo is the perfect system to do that and if you combine it with the power of the Adobe Experience Cloud, you are truly able to orchestrate and measure the customer journey from start to finish.

In this post, I will walk through the integration of Marketo with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions focussing more on Audience Manager but the general process is the same for Adobe Analytics and Target. Please note I'm specifically referring to Marketo Engage but will call it Marketo in this post.

Use Cases

Let's start with some common use cases that can be executed with this integration:

Cross-device media activation of leads (B2B or B2C data from Marketo activated in Audience Manager leveraging the device graph)
Event-driven (signups, abandonments etc.) user messaging (in Marketo based on user behavioral data from Analytics)
Cross-channel and cross-device personalization (via Target and Marketo based on onboarded data, user behavioral data from Analytics leveraging the device graph in Audience Manager)

Prerequisites

Let's take a closer look at some of the prerequisites with this integration.

An Adobe org admin can enable this integration by mapping the IMS org in Marketo (Admin section).
It is recommended to setup the cookie sync as early as possible between the Adobe Experience Cloud ID Service and Marketo's munchkin.js to ensure a higher match rate. The "cookie sync" happens automatically as long as long as both these scripts are present on the page.
The other important piece to keep in mind is that the munchkin cookie needs to match to a known lead with an email address via a hashed id on the website when users authenticate or submit a form or click on an email given that hashed emails IDs are sent to AAM.

Architecture

This is a slightly detailed architecture diagram which shows the bi-directional integration between Marketo and Audience Manager and the general process is the same for Adobe Analytics and Target (currently it's only Marketo -> Target audience sharing).

One thing to note in this architecture is that the Marketo to AAM integration is currently manual but the AAM->Marketo integration is automated where AAM audiences are refreshed in real-time with a backfill done every 24 hours. Step #4 is explained in more detailed in Marketo's official documentation.

Another thing to note is that in Marketo, there will be an option to either "Send to Experience Cloud" (hashed email ids) or "Sync from Experience Cloud Audience" (ECIDs) to send and receive segments respectively. For Target, it's currently a one-way sync from Marketo.

Other Facts

Finally, let's take a quick look at some other interesting facts about the integration with Marketo:

Any email lead data from Marketo to Audience Manager must be hashed (handled automatically from Marketo if these are captured).
There is already an integration between AEM and Marketo where Marketo can receive assets from AEM to embed in emails. More information can be found here.
An integration between Ad Cloud, Real-Time CDP and Marketo is also possible. I have not worked with it directly but will share once I learn more.
This integration is not PHI compliant but can be used for any other customer not mandating PHI compliance.

Hope this gave you a general understanding of how this integration works. Feel free to share your use cases for this integration or let me know if you have any questions.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

AdobeDevBlog: Power Personalized Experiences with Project Firefly

It's never been more important for organizations of all sizes to personalize their experiences for their customers and audiences, and AEM and Adobe Target are two stellar ways to do this.

Here's a link to a post which I coauthored to show how to use Project Firefly, our framework for building custom, cloud-native Adobe apps, to integrate AEM and Target in a separate UI to more easily achieve your personalization goals.

Friday, May 8, 2020

AdobeDevBlog: Adobe I/O Architecture and Use Cases

Adobe I/O is a one-stop shop for developers, giving them everything they need to extend the capabilities of the Adobe tech ecosystem. I coauthored a post where we took a look under the hood at our I/O architecture, components, and all the dev tools and services available on I/O Runtime (Adobe's serverless platform), plus the different Adobe Experience Cloud use cases that I/O makes possible. Here's a link to Adobe's Medium Tech blog post I coauthored and below is the visual of the architecture.

Thursday, November 28, 2019

Adobe.com Blogpost: Adobe Experience Manager to Adobe Target Tips and Tricks

I recently wrote an article published on the Adobe blog site which talks about the benefits of integrating Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Target. I also put together a tips and tricks document which can be found here. Hope you find these helpful!

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