Create Connection

12 min

Objectives

Understand the Data Connection UI
Bring Adobe Experience Platform data into CJA
Understand Person ID and data stitching
Learn the concept of data streaming in Customer Journey Analytics

Connections

Ensure you are logged in to the Adobe Experience Platform.

To go to Customer Journey Analytics within the sandbox environment:

Click on the product selector (nine-dot icon) at the top right.
Select Customer Journey Analytics.

You will see the Customer Journey Analytics projects list.

Let's create our first connection:

click on Data Management > Connections on the top menu;
click Create new connection.

You will see the Create Connection UI.

The UI has three distinct area:

On the top, left side you will find Connection Settings, where you can give your Connection a name and description, and add tags.
On the top, right side you will find the Data Settings, where you will select the correct Sandbox (Sandbox 05) that contains our data. This will ensure the available datasets will be updated accordingly.
At the bottom, you'll find the Dataset area for datasets you want to connect to.

Connection Settings

Name your Connection, ensuring you prefix this with your own name. E.g. [your name] - AEP Bootcamp Data Connection

Data Settings

Select Sandbox 05 from the Sandbox dropdown in the Data Settings;
for the Average number of daily events, select Less that 1 million. This gives CJA an indication of expected volumes, allowing for optimal processing.

Select Datasets

We will now select datasets for our connection.

Select Add Datasets
Search for the dataset CJA - Event Dataset for Website
Check the box to add this dataset to the connection.
Search and when found also select the checkbox in front of the following datasets:
1. CJA - Event Dataset for Call Center
2. CJA - Event Dataset for POS
3. CJA - Event Dataset for Mobile App
4. CJA - Profile Dataset for CRM
5. CJA - Event Dataset for Stackchat Chatbot

Your screen should now look like...

Click on Next to add all checked datasets to your Connection.

You will be taken to the Dataset Settings step...

Person ID and Data Stitching

Our goals in now to join these datasets. If you look under the first Dataset name, you will see a field named Person ID. Each datasets has its own Person ID field. Check each dataset to see what is the Person ID.

As you will notice, most of them have the Person ID selected automatically. This is because a primary identifier is selected in every schema in Adobe Experience Platform. As an example, for the schema for Demo System - Event Schema for Call Center (Global v1.1), the Primary Identifier is set to phoneNumber.

However, you can still influence which identifier will be used to stitch datasets together for your connection. You can use any identifier that is configured as identity in the schema linked to your dataset.

Click on the dropdown to explore the IDs available on each dataset.

As mentioned, we can set different Person IDs for each dataset. This allows you to bring different datasets from multiple origins together in CJA. Imagine bringing in NPS or survey data which would be very interesting and helpful to understand the context and why something has happened.

The name of the Person ID field isn’t important, as long as the value in the Person ID fields correspond. Let say we have email in one dataset and emailAddress in another dataset defined as Person ID. If [email protected] is the same value for the Person ID-field on both datasets, CJA will be able to stitch the data.

Stitching using Person ID

Now that you understand the concept of stitching datasets using the Person ID, lets choose crmId as your Person ID for each dataset.

Select each dataset.
Select crmId from the Person ID dropdown list box.
For each dataset pick a relevant Data source type from the dropdown.
Ensure Import new data is toggled on for each Dataset.
Do not enable Dataset Backfill.

Once you've completed your Dataset Settings, click Add datasets to add them to your Connection.

You will now see the Datasets Added...

Click Save to save your Connection.

Note: It takes some time after saving a Connection for the data to populate in the resulting Workspaces. This time depends on the number of events being processed.

For the purposes of this lab, you can use a connection we defined for you already.

You now have completed setting up a connection for CJA.