A few years ago, the world of onsite personalization with Adobe was much simpler. We had Adobe Target, a client-side library-based tool. It could be used either independently or integrated with other tools from Adobe Experience Cloud or external data sources to create segments and set up personalization. Today, things are much more complex, and in this post, I want to unpack the various onsite personalization options within Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform and explain how and when to use them.

Before we begin, I’d like to add a quick disclaimer: If you’re unfamiliar with the functionalities and concepts within Adobe Experience Platform, and especially Adobe Journey Optimizer, I recommend first reading the following article: The Adobe Journey Optimizer for Beginners. To understand the differences and possibilities of personalization, it’s essential to know the basic terms and capabilities.

Two tools, three options: Adobe’s solutions for onsite personalization

Currently, there are three ways to set up your onsite personalization within AEP & AEC: Target only, Target and Decision Management, and Decision Management & AJO Web Channels. To introduce these options, I would like to focus on the following aspects:

• How can personalized content be created?
• Where do you get your data and, more importantly, your audiences?
• What reporting options are available?

In the next section, I will introduce the three options and explain how personalizing your website works with each of these options.

Option 1: Target Only

The first option is perhaps the simplest: Use only Adobe Target for your on-site personalization. Adobe Target offers two options for content creation: a WYSIWYG editor called Visual Experience Composer and a form-based Composer for using HTML or JSON to create test variations for DOM manipulation. Target also integrates with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), allowing you to export content created in AEM to Adobe Target. This content can then be used in Target to create a personalization activity.

There are several ways to create an audience.

The first is to use Target for audience creation. Here, you can access information from the browser to define a segment.

The second option is to upload data from external sources to Adobe Target and use it in your segments. This could include externally calculated scores or CRM attributes that are mapped to a visitor profile in Adobe Target.

Option 2: Target and Decision Management

The second option I’d like to present in this post is the combination of Adobe Target and Decision Management. Here, content creation and audience assignment take place in AJO (and thus in AEP). In Adobe Target, you can reference a previously created offer decision and add additional audience restrictions, as mentioned in the section on the “Target Only” option. This works with both the Visual Experience Composer and the Form Based Composer. And this is where things start to get complex.

With this solution, Adobe provides two options for assigning content to a specific audience (either in Decision Management or in Adobe Target), and therefore two options for implementing personalization. If you use this method, I strongly recommend developing a strategy and processes for applying your audiences. It’s particularly important to know whether personalization is happening in Target or in Decision Management when analyzing your activities.

Decision Management currently does not offer integrated reporting like Target. If you want to create reports for Offer Decisions, Adobe provides an automatically generated dataset in AEP containing information about which profile viewed a specific offer. To obtain appropriate reporting, you can either access this dataset with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics or connect a third-party reporting tool. The use of the A4T integration is not supported for this type of implementation.

Option 3: Decision Management & AJO Web Channel

The third option I’d like to present is the complete migration of your on-site personalization to the Adobe Experience Platform. This works by creating your personalized offers in Decision Management and using AJO Web Channel to execute the offer decision on your website (which is technically done via Adobe Edge Network / Adobe WebSDK).

Reporting works, as with the second option presented, either within Customer Journey Analytics or a third-party BI tool by accessing the corresponding AEP dataset.

Comparison

When should which be used?

Now that I’ve presented the three options for setting up onsite personalization with Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, I’d like to address the question of when it makes sense to use which setup for your onsite personalization.

Generally, I would suggest the following rule of thumb: If you’re setting up a use case that is exclusively onsite and targets unknown/unauthenticated users, you should only use Adobe Target. If you plan to create onsite personalization as part of a multi- or omnichannel use case for (authenticated) customers, choose one of the AEP-related options.

Both options, which include at least some AEP components, have two major drawbacks in my opinion: First, they currently offer limited options for adding personalized content in a scalable way. While there is AEM Assets integration, particularly for using image offerings, if you plan to replace entire website components as part of your personalization, Decision Management currently only supports the use of simple HTML or HTML templates from AEM Assets. Any changes to your code would require manual adjustments within the tool, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.

Second, setting up an offer decision or a journey that includes an action within a web-based channel is more complex and usually involves multiple stakeholders (since more than one channel is often involved).

Therefore, I believe these methods are too cumbersome to use for personalization that is only displayed on the site. However, in a multi- or omnichannel use case, the AEP-based approaches also offer a significant advantage. Since Decision Management and AJO allow you to centrally manage your content across all channels, you can control your campaigns throughout the entire customer journey. In this case, a hybrid setup can be beneficial: Target only for pure onsite personalization and targeting unknown or unauthenticated users, and AEP for omnichannel campaigns with known and authenticated customers.

Conclusion

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, AEP brings a new level of complexity, but also many new opportunities when it comes to online marketing in general and personalization in particular. I definitely see the advantages of shifting on-site personalization for your authenticated customers to AEP. However, I also see many structural and procedural challenges that come with it, and every company needs to be aware of these in order to address them as early as possible.

I hope this text has helped you gain a little more clarity when it comes to navigating the MarTech world.