Your customers expect nothing less than customized interactions across all digital platforms. They seek relevant content that speaks directly to their interests and needs.

As a powerful personalization tool within the Adobe Experience Cloud collection, Adobe Target gives you everything you need to customize your customers’ experiences.

By using this platform to both test content and tailor it to your audience, you can increase customer satisfaction and engagement.

In this article, you’ll learn how Adobe Target can help you to build long-term relationships and customer loyalty through delivering personalized content.

What is Adobe Target Used For?

Adobe Target offers a suite of features encompassing experimentation, personalization, and product recommendations, providing a holistic solution for optimizing user experiences.

Target is especially helpful for global businesses targeting various audiences. Because manual customization is both time-consuming and costly, a solution that scales personalization across your different customer segments is ideal.

Adobe personalization solution enables you to run A/B and multivariate tests on the different elements of your website. Whether you explore product pages or the checkout process, the test results can quickly tell you which versions generate more conversions.

From there, you can optimize and personalize your brand’s digital experiences to further improve customer engagement and sales.

How Does Adobe Target Work?

Target connects to other Adobe apps through Experience Platform Edge Network. The Edge Network is a distributed infrastructure that empowers Adobe Target’s real-time performance.

Comprising edge servers strategically located in various regions, the network ensures that when a user interacts with a website or app, personalization decisions are made at the edge server closest to the customer.

This decentralized architecture reduces latency and delivers tailored content and recommendations instantly, creating a smooth and responsive user experience.

The Edge Network’s scalability allows Adobe Target to efficiently handle large-scale traffic, making it suitable for global brands with a huge user base.

Connect Target to Your Sites and Apps

Connected to your sites and apps, Target is empowering you to optimize every touchpoint of your digital ecosystem and drive exceptional results.

Experience Platform Web SDK

The Experience Platform Web SDK facilitates the collection of valuable user data, such as browsing behavior, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

This data is sent to Adobe Target for analysis and segmentation, allowing you to create targeted campaigns and deliver personalized experiences to different audience segments.

at.js library

at.js is a JavaScript library developed by Adobe that serves for the integration of Adobe Target with your websites. The library is designed to be lightweight and optimized for fast performance, ensuring that tailored experiences are delivered to users without negatively impacting page load times.

The at.js library allows you to collect data by capturing various user interactions and events on web pages and apps. These actions can include clicking on buttons, links, or other elements, submitting forms, scrolling behavior, and more. Adobe Target’s servers receive this data to use for building visitor profiles and understanding user behavior and engagement patterns.

Adobe Experience Platform Tags

Adobe Experience Platform Tags is a part of the Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem. It serves as a central hub for managing tags and data collection for Adobe Target. With this solution, you can easily arrange data collection for Target across your websites and apps without extensive coding or IT support.

Data is collected via tags—which are snippets of code or scripts added to web pages or app containers. When a user visits a website or interacts with an app, the tags deployed through Adobe Experience Platform Tags automatically collect specific data points based on predefined rules and triggers. These data points may include user behavior, pageviews, clicks, form submissions, and other relevant actions.

Integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive suite of connected applications and services, united by a shared data platform and a set of robust features.

Combine the power of Adobe Target with other Experience Cloud Solutions such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Audience Manager. These integrations help you gather all your important data in one place and create unified and comprehensive customer profiles.

Adobe Target Features

In this section, we’ll explore the core features that set Adobe Target apart—Experimentation, Personalization, Recommendations, and Reporting.

Experimentation

It enables your business to test and optimize different variations of content and experiences to identify what your audience relates to the most.

A/B Testing

As we’ve touched upon, implementing Adobe Target before conducting A/B testing allows you to quickly and accurately compare two versions of a web page or app element to determine which one performs better. Choose to create variations of a page element (such as headline, image, CTA) and split incoming traffic to these variations equally.

By analyzing the performance metrics, you can learn which variation drives higher engagement, conversions, or any other company-specific goal.

Say an e-commerce website wants to determine the impact of different product images on its conversion rate. They create two versions of a product page, each with a different main product image.

Adobe Target equally splits incoming traffic between the two variations, and after the test period, they find that Version A (with a smiling model using the product) leads to a 15% increase in conversions compared to Version B (with just the product image). Here’s how Target serves pages to visitors:

• The user requests a web page via your server
• The web page appears in their browser.
• A first-party cookie is set in the customer’s browser to store behavior.
• The page interacts with the targeting system.
• The content displayed is based on your predefined activity rules.
• The data on user interactions is collected and reflected in reports.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate Testing takes A/B testing to the next level. You can test multiple variations of your various page elements simultaneously to learn how different element combinations impact overall performance.

For example, an online travel agency wants to optimize its search results page. They test multiple combinations of elements like search filters, sort options, and display layouts. Adobe Target runs various combinations in parallel to identify the best combination that leads to the highest number of hotel bookings and satisfied users.

To conduct multivariate testing, Adobe Target tests all the combinations of content with equal probability. For instance, if you test two page elements containing three options, there will be nine possible combinations.

Auto-Allocate

Auto-Allocate is an intelligent feature in Adobe Target. By automatically allocating traffic to the best-performing experience, it optimizes test duration. It ensures that more traffic is directed to the winning variation as soon as possible. This speeds up the learning process and maximizes the impact of successful experiments.

An example use case for Auto-Allocate can be a media streaming platform running an A/B test to compare two subscription plans. As Auto-Allocate observes that Version A (monthly subscription) outperforms Version B (annual subscription) early in the test, it automatically shifts more traffic towards Version A. The platform gains a rapid understanding of the preferred option and displays content accordingly to increase subscription sign-ups.

Personalization

Adobe Target gives you the leverage to implement personalized content using various features, including those infused by Sensei AI.

Automated Personalization

Automated Personalization (AP) uses machine learning to deliver tailored content to each visitor based on their unique customer profile. By combining offers or messages, AP matches different variations to optimize personalization and increase both engagement and conversions.

Let’s consider an online fashion retailer with three customer segments: Casual Shoppers, Trendsetters, and Luxury Seekers. For each segment, Adobe Target creates personalized offer variations based on customer preferences.

• Casual Shoppers. Offers for everyday wear, comfortable clothing, and budget-friendly deals.
• Trendsetters. Content showcasing the latest fashion trends, limited-edition collections, and exclusive deals.
• Luxury Seekers. Premium and high-end offers highlight luxury brands and exclusive membership benefits.

When a visitor lands on the website, Adobe Target’s AP activities quickly analyze their behavior, determine their segment, and dynamically serve the most relevant personalized content.

So, a Trendsetter visiting the website will see personalized offers for the latest fashion trends, while a Casual Shopper will see content focused on comfortable and affordable clothing.

Experience Targeting

Experience Targeting uses the rules you create to provide a diverse selection of content to specific user segments. When visitors interact with your site, Experience Targeting assesses them based on the criteria you’ve defined. If they meet the criteria specified for a particular segment, they are presented with an experience designed for that audience.

For example, you want to deliver personalized experiences to visitors from different geographic regions. Adobe Target’s Experience Targeting checks your user’s location and matches them to experiences based on your criteria. As a result, visitors are presented with an experience built specifically for their country or state.

Recommendations

Adobe Target’s Recommendations feature automatically showcases products that align with your customer’s interests and recent interactions with your digital properties, such as product page views, abandoned shopping carts, etc. These personalized recommendations effectively guide your customers towards relevant items, to both enhance their shopping experience and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.

Imagine a fashion e-commerce website using Recommendations. A customer who previously browsed for summer dresses will now see personalized product recommendations for trendy sandals that perfectly complement their style—all based on their past interactions. This 1 to 1 personalization approach results in more enjoyable buyer journeys.

1:1 AI-powered recommendations

In addition to behavioral targeting, you can set specific algorithm rules, such as, for example, the Content Similarity rule. It ensures that products with similar attributes or characteristics are recommended to users, which expands the range of personalized suggestions.

For example, say a customer visits an online bookstore’s website and navigates to the science-fiction category. AI analyzes their behavior and recommends books from the same genre that have been highly rated and popular among similar-interest users.

Reporting and Analytics

Target uses cookies, machine learning, A/B testing, user identification, and user profile data to discover the most effective content. By focusing on specific user segments, you can ensure that your marketing collateral matches the target audience every time.

The report data generated via Adobe Target can help you decide when to end or pause a campaign, as well as demonstrate exactly where to focus your content marketing efforts.

Choose to download your reports in CSV format for further Excel analysis or explore more options through the intuitive reporting dashboard.

Adobe Target vs Google Optimize

Businesses often compare Adobe Target vs Google Optimize. Indeed, both solutions offer serve for optimizing marketing efforts. However, even though they both provide A/B testing and personalization capabilities, they aren’t rivals anymore.

Adobe Target works with Adobe Suite and provides advanced AI-powered personalization, robust audience segmentation, and a unified data approach. As such, it’s a robust and versatile tool—a sound choice for enterprises and large businesses.

Google Optimize works with Google’s Suite and is more suited towards smaller businesses or those seeking basic A/B testing—especially for websites using Google Analytics. On top of that, it’s worth mentioning that Google Optimize will sunset on September 30, 2023, and will no longer be available after this date.

Conclusion

Upon reading this article, you’ll be in a better position to understand how Adobe Target can help your business create and deliver personalized experiences to different audiences.

A/B testing, multivariate testing, and AI-driven insights help to optimize your marketing strategies through data-driven decisions to improve conversions. Integration with other Adobe solutions within the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem means you can enjoy a consistent approach to generating tailored customer experiences.