Adobe said Thursday it had integrated Adobe Analytics into its Audience Manager data management platform (DMP).
The integration makes it easier for marketers to combine first- and third-party data sets to deliver consistent messaging, and marketers can pull execution data back into their reporting tools for a better view of their customers.
“Over the last few years we’ve seen our customers gravitate toward the ability to deliver experiences to customers across every device and channel,” said Ali Bohra, director of strategy and product marketing for Adobe Audience Manager. “We saw the [need] to bring sets of insights closer to systems of action.”
Cruise line Holland America, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp., beta tested the integration. The company wanted to make its site more adaptive and personalized to how a consumer interacts with the brand off-property, said Aaron Fossum, direct of digital analytics at Holland America.
“We want our marketing tied to a conversation with our customers,” he said. “It’s all about segmenting and testing for us.”
Before the integration, Holland America manually tied its CRM and first-party data to its DMP. For example, it would download audience segments from its DMP and pull them into its email execution tool one by one. The process took a lot of time and required a precise coordination effort by its team and its agencies. It often led to messaging discrepancies on- and off-site, Fossum said.
“We might be messaging someone [off-site] to take a Caribbean cruise and then emailing them about Alaska,” he said.
Adobe’s integration automates the flow of first-, second- and third-party and media execution data to better coordinate what users see on- and off-site, making Holland America’s segmentation strategy more efficient and coordinated around a customer.
“We can make sure the same person who is in segment A for our external advertising is also in segment A for onsite messaging so we can give them consistent experience,” Fossum said. “It allows us to address the guest as a single person whereas the more manual method treats them like multiple profiles.”
Holland America can then pull the campaign data sitting within Audience Manager into Adobe Analytics for a more precise view of how that customer behaves across the web.
“Being able to take that exposure information on everybody who saw their campaigns and overlay that within their analytics, attribution and reporting helps them better measure and think about their audiences,” said Kiki Burton, director of product management for Adobe Audience Manager. “That helps them better forecast, plan and ultimately buy their media effectively.”
The new integration helped Holland America improve the efficiency of its direct-response buys by 20-30% by making it easier to identify which cruise guests would be more responsive to such ads. The cruise company also can better analyze its targeting strategy to understand which users who saw a specific ad showed up onsite and took action.
“It’s been great for validating our segmentation strategy,” Fossum said. “Our job is to know our guests better so we can serve our guests better, and if we do a good job of that, we’re going to sell more cruises.”
The integration, available to customers using Adobe’s Experience Cloud, passes data between the DMP and Adobe Analytics in real time, Burton said. Holland America is one of 19 customers testing the beta. Adobe also is getting publishers up and running on the integration; the publishers can use it to better cater their content to specific audiences by understanding what they respond to across the web.
“The closer you can get those two systems together, the quicker marketers can realize value with all of the customer information they have within their technology suite,” Bohra said.
