Showing posts with label launch by adobe. Show all posts

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Overview of Real-Time CDP

Companies are continuously innovating and coming up with new tools and technologies to enhance the experience of its customers. Optimizing and personalizing the experience of customers at every touchpoint needs to be the holy grail for all companies. I gave an overview of a Data Management Platform a few years ago and have written a few article about Adobe Audience Manager since then.

In this post, I'll write about Real-Time Customer Data Platform which is the activation engine and a service built on Adobe Experience Platform and how it solves the ever evolving challenge of a consistent and personalized user experience. As you may be aware, Adobe Experience Platform is built with an API-first approach which makes integrating with other platforms easier and it also allows us to replicate what we can do in the UI via APIs as well.

It's always helpful to start simple so I'll give a brief overview of what a Customer Data Platform is. There's a lot of documentation which compares a CDP to a DMP so I won't go into that in detail but will just focus on what a CDP is.

According to Wikipedia, "A customer data platform is a type of packaged software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems".

I define it as a system which consolidates known and anonymous customer information from multiple data sources to serve 1:1 real-time personalized experiences across multiple touch points and marketing channels in a privacy aware manner. Below is a visual overview of a CDP (taken from a 3rd party site). The diagram looks very similar to a DMP but a CDP differs with a DMP in the following ways:

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

Source: https://www.emailvendorselection.com/customer-data-platform-cdp-evolution-marketing-automation/

Core Elements of Real-Time CDP

Below are some core components of the Real-Time CDP and how it relates to Adobe Experience Platform.

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.

A lot more information can be found in the official Adobe documentation in addition to what I've covered.

Adobe Solution Integration with Real-Time CDP

Visuals always help so I created a quick high-level data flow diagram outlining how data flows into and outside of AEP/Real-Time CDP from various Adobe solutions. Only the arrows coming into and flowing out of AEP/Real-Time CDP are colored and these connections can be enabled OOTB. The diagram should be self-explanatory but web data flows into AEP/Real-Time CDP via the AEP Web SDK/Adobe Analytics and 2nd/3rd party/other data flows into Real-Time CDP from Audience Manager. Data from Real-Time CDP can be shared with Adobe Campaign to personalize emails.

Real-Time CDP UI Overview

I'll now provide a high level overview of the Real-Time CDP UI but please be aware that these are likely to change as product is continuously making changes to optimize the user experience and add more enhancements.

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.

Identities

The identity page contains identity namespaces which contain unique information about a person. As shown below, an identity namespace can be Email, address Phone number, ECID etc. This is also embedded within the Adobe Experience Platform UI.

Sources

The Sources->Catalog tab allows us to bring data into AEP/Real-Time CDP from various sources such as Adobe applications, CRM, Marketing automation to name a few. Data from these can be combined with each other and sent to various activation platforms. Again, this is also embedded within the Adobe Experience Platform UI.

Destinations

The Destinations->Catalog tab allows us to activate the audiences and share them with ESPs, marketing automation and advertising platforms. This is the core feature of Real-Time CDP which you won't see present in the regular AEP UI. There are two ways to send data via 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.

This UI as shown below shows us the standard connections but also lets us connect to Launch which allows us to forward raw signals captured in Launch using extensions to any 3rd party partner.

The following is a visual (representational) system view which shows how many profiles are connected to sources and are sent to a destination.

Finally, I want to emphasize that I've not heard anything about Adobe Audience Manager being impacted by Real-Time CDP as we still need AAM for 2nd and 3rd party data activation. Also, Audience Manager has over 100 destinations whereas Real-Time CDP only has a few (currently) with connections to CRM, cloud providers and email systems but the list will only grow. I don't know about the overall product vision around the total numbers destinations and AAM in general but I'm sure our product team will clarify that.

So, that was it! I'm sure I've left out other finer details about Real-Time CDP but this tool is continuing to evolve and will only get better as its adoption increases.

Sunday, May 26, 2019

Access Adobe APIs Using Postman

APIs (Application Programming Interface) facilitate the transfer of information between two systems and are leveraged in a magnitude of industries today ranging from Travel to Retail. Adobe offers open source APIs in its solutions across the Document, Creative and Experience Clouds. Major companies leverage APIs to allow users to do the following:

Share content on Social Media (Facebook)
Retrieve flight information (Alaska Airlines)
Real-time access to item price and availability (Amazon)
Access maps using GPS (Google Maps)
Tracking information on shipments (FedEx)
Server Side Analytics Implementation (Adobe)

In this post, I will cover how to leverage Adobe APIs for Launch by Adobe and Audience Manager but these APIs are also available to use across some other Experience Cloud solutions such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target via Adobe I/O. We won't go into the basics of how to create integrations as there's a lot of documentation available on it but we'll cover the steps on how to call the APIs using authentication tokens in Postman. Please note that Audience Manager is not part of Adobe I/O yet and we'll specifically cover REST APIs to work with elements within the AAM UI. Let's jump right in!

Launch By Adobe APIs

The first solution we will cover is Launch where we'll create a property and you can use this format to create , data elements, rules, environments etc. The first step is to go to the Adobe I/O console which shows you all the integrations setup for your experience cloud org. In this case, we've created an integration with Launch APIs using Adobe I/O.

Make sure you either select the Developer role or the Admin role (while creating the integration) in order to create properties. I had chosen Approver as listed in the instructions in our documentation which walks us through how to create an integration but that didn't let me create a Launch property.

The following screen will show you your API credentials which you'll need to access the API and the ones which is required is API Key and Client Secret. We'll also need the Org ID that needs to be sent as an additional attribute in one of the requests we'll make in one of the API calls covered later in this post.

The next step is to generate the JWT (JSON Web Token) which will be used to authenticate and access the Launch APIs. The Private Key is generated as part of the public certificate (CRT file) creation process outlined in the Launch documentation. Please note that during the creation of the certification, an additional file called private.key is generated which contains this information.

The next step is to use the generated JWT to create a Launch token that will be used to access Adobe APIs.

We need to now copy the generated JWT in Postman to create a new access token (valid for 24 hours) but before that, I want to share with you a tip which my colleague Gil Jimenez shared with me. The tip is to create global variables in Postman to store sensitive values that you'll need to access over and over again. You can do that by clicking on the Environment icon as shown below. The other thing you can do is to save these API calls as collections in the form of separate folders as shown below in the left section.

Generate a Launch Access Token

The next step is to generate an access token using the client_id, client_secret and jwt_token parameters by making a POST request to https://ims-na1.adobelogin.com/ims/exchange/jwt/ as explained here. Note how we're using the global variables to store sensitive information and accessing it in the call. We need copy this access token and store it. In our case, we're storing it in a separate variable calls access-token which is different that the jwt-token we need to create it.

Make a POST Request to Create a Property

We'll now create a new Launch property by making a POST request to https://reactor.adobe.io/companies/:company_id/properties as covered here. We can also create Launch rules, data elements, environments etc using this method. Below is how we can make this call.

Once we press send, we successfully (if everything goes well) create a Launch property as shown below. So using APIs, developers can literally do everything in Launch without having to login to Launch. These APIs are open source and super powerful!

Make a GET Request for a Property

We'll now cover how make a GET request to https://reactor.adobe.io/properties/:id to fetch the details of the Launch property we just created by entering the property ID (starting with PR) which you can get from the response you get when you created the property. We're going to leverage some mandatory attributes defined here as shown below (The {{property}} value stores the property ID). You can use this to get access to a lot of information such as name, creation timestamp, domains etc. We can also fetch the details of data elements, rules and extensions among other things.

Adobe Audience Manager REST APIs

We'll now cover how to make GET and POST requests for AAM using Postman to access REST APIs (centered around the AAM UI) which allow you to perform some basic functions without logging into the AAM UI. Please note that there's another set of APIs called DCS APIs (send data to AAM) which I'll save for a future post.

Generate an AAM Access Token

As I mentioned earlier, the AAM APIs are not yet part of Adobe I/O so in order to access the REST APIs, we need the following credentials to access the APIs:

AAM API user name (AAM Admin UI)- Adobe consultant can provide this
AAM API password (AAM Admin UI)- Adobe consultant can provide this
AAM UI Username (bank.demdex.com login)
AAM UI Password (bank.demdex.com login)

Once you have these credentials, we can leverage Postman to get the access token which is only valid for a few minutes. Here we enter the AAM API and password using Basic Auth and send a POST request to https://api.demdex.com/oauth/token.

The next step is to enter the AAM UI credentials as shown below to generate the access token that will be used to access additional APIs.

Make a POST Request to Create a Folder

We can access all AAM APIs in the Swagger API portal. The first thing we want to create is a folder by sending a POST call to https://api.demdex.com/v1/folders/traits/ using the Bearer Token auth type as shown below. The folder is "REST API Test" and it will be placed under the root "All Traits" folder.

Once the call goes through successfully, we should see the following message and the folder should show up in the AAM UI immediately.

Make a POST Request to Create a Trait

We'll now create a simple trait by sending a POST request to https://api.demdex.com/v1/traits/. The only additional attributes we're adding is the Folder ID and the Data Source ID which we can get from the AAM UI. The result is the following as shown in the screenshots below.

Please note that the API doesn't have a way to create traits in bulk so you can leverage BAAAM to do so which is a custom solution.

Make a GET Request to Retrieve all Traits

This is the final request in this post to get details about traits but you can retrieve data for segments, destinations, data sources etc. We send a GET request to https://api.demdex.com/v1/traits/ to retrieve all traits within our AAM instance. In our case, we can see that the trait we just created can be accessed using this method and you can export this JSON output and perform additional searches.

So, this was just a small glimpse into what's possible via APIs where we're able to perform the same tasks that we usually do in the Adobe solution specific UIs. This also shows us that almost everything that happens in the UI is driven by APIs so in a way we took a look under the hood of Launch and Audience Manager. Hope you found this post useful.

Saturday, April 20, 2019

Implement CTR tracking in Adobe Analytics via Launch

A client asked me to come up with a solution on how to track Click Through Rate (CTR) without tracking clicks due to server call constraints. Historically, I've always tracked Click Through Rate on a particular page by capturing the page name in an eVar along with a custom event for page view. For clicks, I've used a custom link name eVar and a custom click event. Then I would create a calculated metric which divides the custom clicks by custom page views (CTR %) and include that as a metric in the page name report.

This client didn't want to use ActivityMap due to security constraints as they had some links which had borderline sensitive information. The other requirement was to control the logic that constitutes a "click" but a majority of my clients use ActivityMap though and I do like it. So, they asked me how to calculate CTR WITHOUT capturing a click event as they were concerned about server calls which is a fair ask. After a few unsuccessful tries, I eventually stumbled upon this article from Adam Greco. This post will cover how to implement Adam's solution using Launch and show how that materializes in actual reporting.

What we need to set this up

A Tag Management Solution like Launch or some other TMS
A custom plug-in called getPreviousValue which will allow us to capture the value of the previous page name
A JavaScript variable to capture the previous page name
Products string
s.pageName
1 eVar (Merchandizing eVar to capture Page Name)
2 events (Clicks, Page Impressions)

Implementation In Launch

The first step is add the getPreviousValue plug-in to the custom code section of the Adobe Analytics extension instead of a rule. This is how I implement plug-ins in Launch so that they're readily available across the board and populate on every hit if needed.

The next step is to create a global page load rule tied to DOM Ready where we need to add some more custom code to track to wrap this solution up.

This is the crux of the solution where use the products string to create "fake" products and store the previous page name in a global variable called PrevPn. The code captures the current page name on page view along with a unique page view event (event7) on page view. On the next page, our code populates the current page name (eVar7) tied to event7 (Page Impressions) and also captures the previous page name in the same eVar7 along with a separate event8 (Page Clicks). Please note that we've assigned "fake" SKUs of "imp" and "click" in the products string which will show up in the Products report. Also, the if statements are key for this to work as each condition is meant to identify a page view with or without a previous page name.

Click to zoom in

Validation

In my sandbox site, I can see that I'm capturing both the current (company) and previous page name (activewear) in the products string after clicking a link.

Reporting

The first step is to create a calculated metric to calculate CTR (Page Clicks/Page Impressions) which I've shown here.

The next step is to put it all in a report to show how it all comes together. This report shows the merchandizing Page name along with the custom events and a calculated metric to capture CTR.

Drawback of this Solution and an Alternative

There's no way to differentiate which link performed well but an alternative will be to store the link name on click in a cookie and then retrieve that on the next hit in a separate merchandizing eVar within the products string. This will be in addition to the existing solution to track CTR based on the page name eVar.

So, that's a wrap and hope you like it! With this, we're able to implement a solution that captures the CTR on a page without tracking clicks thereby saving server calls.

Sunday, March 31, 2019

My Experience at The Adobe Summit 2019

I attended Adobe Summit earlier this week held at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas and walked ~72,000 steps in 6 days (Saturday to Thursday). In these six days, I only went out of the hotel twice which in a way is shocking but that's because the Venetian hotel is a city in itself and it also goes to show how busy I was. This was my second Adobe Summit and my first as an Adobe employee but the important thing to call out is that attending Summit as an Adobe employee is completely opposite than that of attending as a client or partner. Simply put, you don't get to attend Summit (as a consultant) unless you're presenting or doing a lab which I personally think makes a ton of sense and I want to especially thank the Adobe leadership team who gave me an opportunity.

I did a lot of things at Summit and want to summarize all I did but the one I'm most proud of is the speaking session with Garrett Friedrichsen who's my client from Mastercard with whom we presented to over 200 people. Let's take a look at some of the things I did:

Teaching Assistant in pre-conference trainings- The pre-conference trainings happen right before Summit kicks off so I landed in Las Vegas on Saturday instead of Monday as the actual conference began on Tuesday. My initial TA duty was supposed to be on Audience Manager fundamentals but I ended up swapping to cover basics of Launch by Adobe at the very last minute. Even though it was very tiring due a commitment of eight full hours, it was still a great experience for me as I proactively helped the instructor and for one of the lesson, took over on his request. The most satisfying thing for me was being able to help the students and answering ad-hoc questions about their implementation. The other good thing about this was that I got a feel for how to face an audience of over 50 people.

Adobe Booth duty- This was one of the highlights for me as this is where I got to catch up with my rockstar co-workers and the leadership team in person. In addition to this, I answered ad-hoc questions from clients and partners primarily on Analytics and Audience Manager.

Ad-hoc Customer meeting- This happened as one of the account teams reached out to me and asked me to meet their client (not mine) to discuss my experience working with clients who incorporate agile methodologies in their analytics implementation. The conversation went well as the customer and I ended up addressing a lot of general challenges and potential solutions around agile, implementation challenges and enablement of resources within an organization. We have some next steps and the account team will work on executing those with the client.

Teaching Assistant in Labs (Video Heartbeat and Adobe Analytics)- Personally, I didn't add much value here as my main role was to work with other TAs to help attendees/students with their preexisting lab exercises and computers. All in all, it was a good experience to see how other instructors go about with their lessons.

Co-Speaking Session on Adobe Audience Manager- This was easily the most challenging and satisfying part of Summit for me. I wouldn't lie but I was quite nervous before the presentation as this was the biggest group of people (235 people attended) I had ever presented in front of (previous was probably 20). My session (Audience Driven Campaigns in Financial Services, Featuring Mastercard) started with an icebreaker but I did speak fast at times which is something I'll work on. As I got to presenting my core slides, my flow got much better as I knew the most about the subject. Overall, the presentation went well as the silver lining was that people came up to both Garrett and I to congratulate us but most importantly asked questions and engaged with us after the session. Having presented for the first time to a big audience, I would like to share some tips in case you want to do it as well:

Rehearse but not so much that you end up cramming the content
Get to the conference room 15-20 minutes early to prep and get set up
Have an ice breaker at the start (mine was to wish the Japanese audience Konnichiwa and also wish my co-speaker Happy birthday)
Try to include a relevant analogy for your presentation but be 100% sure that it's relevant and not overdone. We didn't include one but will probably do so next time
Speak slowly and take deep breathes in between
Stay hydrated (very important)
Gauge the audience reaction and mood to adjust if necessary. Sometimes, the audience in the room already knows a lot of what you're saying so it may make sense to go deep but there's a fine line here so be careful.
Make enough time available for questions and engage with the attendees after your session is over
Don't get intimidated and overawed by the situation. It's important to remember that the attendees are people just like you and they're attending to learn from you so relax and enjoy the moment
Finally, push yourself out of your comfort zone and take the plunge to speak. Trust me, if do it once you would want to do it again and again!

Got a demo of the Adobe Experience Platform- I feel the Experience platform is a game changer for Adobe and it will elevate Adobe to a whole new level. The real-time platform allows us to ingest any data (including PII), control privacy, query data, visualize data, leverage machine learning and AI at scale to name a few. Here's a link to it and I'll hopefully write about it as I learn more.

Killers Concert and Wrap up- Adobe summit wrapped up and did justice to the phrase "Work hard and play harder". Honestly, it was hard to enjoy myself before my speaking engagement but after I was done, it was the best feeling not just because it was over but because I felt the hard work paid off which is why I didn't miss any opportunity to enjoy myself at the concert.

All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity and I hope to come back in some capacity next year and continue to add value for the company. I've added some pictures from the conference.

The amazingly beautiful Venetian hotel

An awesome surprise for all AAM speakers from our track manager, Rakhi Patel

Dinner with client

In one of the labs

My presentation

Working our magic at the booth

Awesome Adobe booth crew and my coworkers

The Killers performing on stage!

This happened outside right after the concert where the DJ played some awesome music. It was completely unexpected and a ton of fun!

Product Management Insight