Real-time CDP

20 min

Scenario

Based on our analysis we identified that offline sales are trending up and that we have some younger customers researching online and purchasing in store. We've shared that audience already with CDP for use in an online only promotion. This audience will be activated across multiple destinations for personalisation onsite (Adobe Target or Adobe Journey Optimizer), ecommerce (Adobe Commerce) and advertising (eg. Google, Tiktok, meta).

In addition, based on the cancellation trend Frescopa decide to run a retention campaign targeting any of their existing subscribers who are likely to churn.

As part of the Marketing Operations team at Frescopa you have been tasked to define the target audiences for the planned campaign. Our audience from CJA was focusing on past behaviour, in this lab we will create a real-time Audience to identify at risk subscribers when they land on the website.

Of course, we also support non Adobe solutions for real-time personalisation and e-commerce use cases, these are enabled through the Custom Personalisation destination connector. If you want to know more, ask one of the solution consultants nearby and we'll be happy to run you through it.

Access

Switch to Adobe Experience Platform using the solution switcher:

For this exercise we will use the FAC (AUS5) sandbox. Change to this sandbox if you are not already in there.

Visit the Website

Before we start creating audiences for our use case, let's take a quick look at how streaming event data is ingested in real time, and how it can be used to personalize onsite experiences.

Open the Frescopa website in an incognito browser and click around a few pages.

https://dsn.adobe.com/p/frescopacoffee

Adobe's SDK is implemented on the page and is collecting tracking events with every click.

Click on the Adobe Icon to open the profile viewer in the top left corner.

You can see that initially our profile is anonymous, we have only Adobe's Experience Cloud Id.

Click on the Events tab to see the events that have been recorded in real-time against the profile.

Click to view one of the Machine products.

This will trigger a real-time audience qualification. Click on the Frescopa logo to return to the home page. The messaging on the banner image is updated.

Note that some flicker is expected here on our demo website, proper implementation on a production website can avoid this side effect.

The profile will remain anonymous until a customer identifier is provided. Click on the Sign In button on the top right.

Use one of the email addresses below to authenticate on the website. No password is needed.

Firstname	Email	Customer Type
Belinda	[email protected]	ROBI
Jocelyn	[email protected]	Churn Risk
Rana	[email protected]	ROBI
Gertruda	[email protected]	Churn Risk
Mattheus	[email protected]	ROBI
Jena	[email protected]	Churn Risk
Derick	[email protected]	ROBI
Mychal	[email protected]	Churn Risk
Susana	[email protected]	ROBI
Corilla	[email protected]	Churn Risk

View the events tab again, the Web Signin event will trigger a new entry into the Identity Graph, stitching the ECID with the Email address.

Stitching of new identities takes a few minutes, so you won't see the profile attributes update immediately here, but that doesn't mean we can't qualify for segments and personalise in real-time.

Depending on your customer type the experience on the home page will now be updated.

If the customer you authenticated as a churn risk customer, click on the Support page to trigger your segment qualification.

Now return to the home page by clicking on the Frescopa logo. The banner will again update in real-time.

ROBI customers : 10% online only discount

Churn risk customers: Free delivery offer

Now that you've seen the data collection and audience qualification in action, let's move on to viewing the profile in Adobe Experience Platform and creating some real-time audiences of your own.

The Unified Profile

The data collected from all of the source systems is unified into an actionable profile based on the identities collected from each source. Follow the instructions below to look up the profile you just authenticated with on the website.

Browse to Customer -> Profiles. The Overview dashboard shows insights on how many profiles exist in the sandbox along with the distribution of identities.

To lookup a specific profile, move to the Browse tab.

Profiles can be retrieved by any of the attributes which have been defined as "Identities". Which Identity Namespaces are leveraged depends on your organisations requirements. Frescopa are currently using a custom cross device id called Demo System - CRM ID as well as Email address to identify known users. Any user who's authenticated on the website will have one or more ECID cookies also. For this exercise we will use a known customer id to look up your profile.

First set the Identity Namespace to be Email or Demo System - CRM ID. Then use any of the customer id's below to look up their profile.

Demo System - CRM ID	Email
43fb90f8-1b09-48b8-9f4c-23bf51f343ca	[email protected]
1f7fea99-6480-496b-8e02-7222b7d99815	[email protected]
cd39adb2-21de-452b-adec-202fa56d192a	[email protected]
47d28cfc-97fa-4854-b056-9664941d094c	[email protected]
66b660f9-f76c-4d2a-8f01-048fc6d1075d	[email protected]
7a6ac21e-980c-4122-bc0f-61f3a6823770	[email protected]
12e379aa-2994-4dd9-9f31-476fe0ff0a06	[email protected]
b4bf11db-7207-4bce-a1d5-b9fb8d5eede9	[email protected]
75ee7da5-e92d-4d25-a4a7-dbc49945d300	[email protected]
91b118eb-bfed-485d-b4dc-ecb2f80e4ed2	[email protected]

Click to View button to search for the profile, then click on the Profile Id to view the profile details.

The Detail tab shows us an overview of the profile, which fields are displayed here can be customised according to business needs.

There are 2 main types of data collected against the profile, Attributes and Experience Events. Profile can change over time while Experience Events represent point in time interactions a profile has had with your brand, whether that's viewing a web page, watching a show, making a booking, calling the call center or visiting a store.

Click on the Attributes tab to view the full list of attributes ingested for this profile. These attributes can come from different source systems, Adobe Experience Platform will merge them in real-time.

Click on the Events tab. Here you can see a chronological view of all the behavioural experience events coming from different source systems for this profile. These events are ingested in real-time from the sources like your website and mobile app.

Move to the Audience membership tab. Here you can see which audiences the profile is currently a member of, this list will update as the profile moves in and out of audiences based on their attributes and behavior.

Lastly, return to the Details tab and click to view the Identity Graph.

Here you can see a visualisation of the Identity Graph linking all of the different sources of information together to create our profile. You can see that there are multiple ECID's or Cookie ID's attached to the profile, this represents the different devices that the customer has identified themselves on.

Use the slider to see how the graph grew as the profile interacted over time.

Create an audience

In this exercise you will create a new audience for our campaign. You can choose to create the audience via the agent or manually using our drag and drop audience builder.

Use the Agent

Create Manually

In this exercise you can explore how the AI Assistant can support you across your workflows, including:

Product knowledge to understand concepts on the fly

Operational Insights to gain insight on objects you or your team have built

Product Support - create and lodge support tickets on your behalf

Audience plannning and creation

Click to open the AI Assistant in the top right corner.

Click on the lightbulb in the top right to open the discovery panel, here you'll find some suggestions for the types of prompts by category that AI Assistant can help you with.

Navigate to Pointed Learning and click on the prompt: How is the identity graph built.

The prompt will automatically populate in the text input box of AI Assistant, press enter to execute the query and view AI Assistant's response.

To verify the response provided you can review the Sources that are listed below the response.

AI Assistant is also able to help with Operational Insights based on what is configured within your sandbox. In the AI Assistant input field, ask “What do you know about audience Frecscopa Active Subscriber”

Once AI Assistant provides a response, take note of the structured output, which consists of three key sections:

Actual response and data – The primary insights retrieved from Adobe Experience Platform.

How AI Assistant interpreted your question – Explanation of AI Assistant’s reasoning.

How the answer was derived – The logic and steps behind the response.

We can use AI Assistant to explore the data model available for creating audiences

Ask AI Assistant: Do I have any fields storing churn scores?

We can now start to use AI Assistant for audience creation.

This feature is still in exploration and is not generally available.

Expland the AI Assistant to full screen mode to for easier readability for this request.

Ask AI Assistant: Create an audience of active subscribers with churnPrediction score over 75

The assistant will create a multi-step plan for creating the audience. There are 3 steps involved:

Identify audience characteristics and definition

Estimate the size

Propose and save

You will be involved through each step ensuring nothing is created without your approval.

Type yes to proceed to step 1.

With step 1 complete, you can see the review the proposed audience definition. If you are not happy with this definition you can request to return to step 1 and / or change the criteria. In our case we'll simply type yes to continue to step 2.

You should now have an estimated audience size and you can decide to proceed to step 3.

Lastly you need to review the proposed audience. Click to Review.

Audience details are shown on the right hand side. Click Create to approve the changes.

Your audience has been created. Click on the link to view the audience in the Audience Portal.

You should see your new audience ready for activation to a marketing Destination or for owned channels in Adobe Journey Optimizer.

In this exercise we will leverage the rule based audience builder to create our audience. The audience will have two rules:

Predictive Churn Score - calculated externally or by Adobe is greater than 70

Customer has visited the support or contact page today

Click on Customer -> Audiences, then click Browse to open the Audience Portal.

Click on the filter icon. The origin shows the many types of audiences that can be found in the portal. Each audience can be tagged for easy filtering, apply a filter for Frescopa tag, to show the audiences already available.

Let's create our new audience. Click to Create Audience in top right corner.

Click to Build rule and click Create.

The drag and drop audience builder will open. Search for Churn in the attributes tab.

Drag the churnPrediction attribute into the canvas and set the condition to is greater than 70. You can click the Refresh estimate to get an idea of how many profiles will qualify so far.

Next we'll add the event based condition. Click to move to the events tab.

Search for page and click into the Web Page Details element.

Drag the Name attribute into the canvas. This attribute contains the page name collected from the website.

Change the event rules to specify the Name should contain support or contact. Hint: type one value into the text box and hit enter before adding the second.

Next we'll change the timerange for our event to be within the last day.

Lastly we need to configure the Audience Properties:

Name: give your audience a unique name - include your initials perhaps

Description: an optional description to help others understand the purpose of this audience - this will also be leveraged by the audience agent to understand more about the audience.

Tags: add the Frescopa tag for easy sorting and filtering

Evaluation Method: Set the evaluation method to Edge - this ensures the audience will qualify in real-time (sub 250 milliseconds) when the customer lands on the website.

Click to Publish the audience.

Congratulations! You've created your first audience in Adobe Experience Platform. We can now Activate the audience to marketing Destinations or use it for owned channels in Adobe Journey Optimizer.

One of Adobe's differentiators is being able to create dynamic and sequential audiences within this rule builder. We can for example build audiences based on a sequence of behaviours such as - viewed a product, then added it to their cart but did not make any purchases.

Activate Audience

Now that your audience is created, you can activate it to a marketing Destination or use it for direct activation on your owned channels through Adobe Journey Optimizer.

From the audience details screen, click to Activate to destination

You can see the list of connected destinations. Select one of the social destinations, either Meta, Tiktok or Linked In. In our example below we'll use Tiktok.

Tiktok supports the activation of identities:

GAID - Google Advertising ID

IDFA - Apple ID for Advertisers

phone_sha256 - Phone numbers hashed with SHA256 algorithm

email_lc_sha256 - Email addresses hashed with SHA256 algorithm

Export Type = Segment Export

Tiktok both require that no personally identifiable information (PII) is sent in clear. Therefore, the audiences activated to these destinations can be keyed off hashed identifiers, such as email addresses or phone numbers.

The mapping step only needs to be completed once, and is already configured on this destination. For Tiktok we used the clear text email and phone number and requested for this data to be "transformed" ie. hashed on export. Click Next to proceed to the next step.

Finally, on the Review page, click Finish.

Your audience is now activated to Tiktok

For Tiktok, a successful activation means that a Tiktok custom audience would be created programmatically. Segment membership in the audience would be added and removed as users are qualified or disqualified for the activated segments.

The integration between Adobe Experience Platform and Tiktok supports historical audience backfills. All historical segment qualifications get sent to Tiktok when you activate the segments to the destination.

Summary

By consolidating known and pseudonymous customer data from diverse sources—such as CRM systems, behavioural events, and device IDs—RTCDP creates a single, actionable view of your customers. AEP Provides a central repository for all of your audiences regardless of how they're created. Enrich and segment unified profiles in real time with the segmentation service and leverage AI-powered insights to fuel your workflows, ensuring your campaigns are on target and relevant.