Sharing Experience Cloud Audiences

One of the advantages that Adobe Analytics offers over other digital analytics tools is that it is part of a suite of products. Analytics integrates with AEM, Adobe Target, and other Adobe Experience Cloud products. Adobe has been transitioning more and more of its features to the “core” level so users can share things between Adobe Experience Cloud products. One of the most interesting things that can be shared are audiences (segments). However, I have not seen as many of my customers take advantage of these types of integrations. So in this post, I am going to share a simple example of sharing audiences in the Adobe Experience Cloud using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target that my partner Brian Hawkins and I created as an experiment. While the example we use is very simplistic, it does a good job of demonstrating how easy it is to share audiences/segments between the various Adobe products.

Scenario

Since our Analytics Demystified website doesn’t have much other than blog posts, the best scenario we could come up with was to promote our B2B services through internal promotions. The idea is to find website visitors who have viewed a bunch of our blog posts and see if we can get them to engage with our consulting services. In reality, that isn’t why we write blog posts and we don’t expect people to actually click on the promotion, but this is just a demo scenario. In this scenario, I will be the guinea pig for the integration and look for people who have viewed at least two of my blog posts but never viewed any of the website pages that explain my consulting services. Once I isolate these folks, I want to target them with a promo that advertises my services.

Adobe Analytics

To implement this, you need to start in Adobe Analytics and make sure you have data being collected that will help you isolate the appropriate website visitors. In this case, since I want to identify visitors who have viewed “Adam Greco” blog posts, I need to have a way to identify different blog posts (Blog Post Title) and the author of each blog post (Blog Post Author). I already have these setup as eVars in my implementation, so I am set there. Next, I need a way to identify each page separately, which I do by using the Page sProp.

With all of these elements in place, the next step is to build a segment in Adobe Analytics. The segment I want is one that includes visitors that have viewed “Adam Greco” author blog posts and viewed two or more different blog posts (this uses the new Distinct Count segmentation feature I blogged about last week). I also have an “exclude” portion of the segment to take out visitors who have viewed some pages that promote me and my services. Once I am happy with the segment, I can use the checkbox at the bottom of the segment to make it a shared Experience Cloud audience.

Adobe Target

Once the segment has been shared and propagates to the Experience Cloud (which can take a few hours), it is time to set up the promotional area on the website using Adobe Target. This is done by leveraging our “global mbox” and the URL of the pages where we wish to have the content displayed. We chose the right-rail of all blog pages:

Next, within Adobe Target, you can set up a test and target it to the audience (segment) that was created in Adobe Analytics (Called “Adam Greco Consideration, But No Intent”):

Next, you can set up a goal in Adobe Target to monitor the progress:

Once this test is live, Adobe Analytics will continuously update the segments as visitors traverse the site and Adobe Target will push the promotion as dictated by the segment. For example, if a user has not met the segment criteria (viewed less than two Adam blog posts or has viewed Adam services pages), they would see a normal blog post page like this:

But if the visitor matches the segment, they would be targeted with the right-rail promo as highlighted here:

We are also able to validate that we are in the test using this free Adobe Target Chrome Extension from MiaProva:

Summary

As mentioned above, this is just a silly example of how you can take advantage of Experience Cloud integrations. However, the concept here is the most important part. The better your Adobe Analytics implementation, the more opportunities you have to build cool segments that can be turned into audiences in other Experience Cloud products! I encourage you to look for situations in which you can leverage the synergistic effects offered by using multiple Adobe Experience Cloud products concurrently.