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LAS VEGAS—Among the many moves Adobe made here this week at Adobe Summit 2016, the company’s annual digital marketing conference, was advancing its Adobe Target personalization solution.
The new Adobe Target features new data science enhancements, new algorithms to personalize content, new mobile capabilities, and enhanced integration between Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, among other updates.
Adobe Target is a tool for testing and targeting digital experiences. It includes a user interface, built-in best practices and optimization tools for following site visitors. It features self-learning algorithms that help companies track consumer preferences and provide personalized product or content recommendations.
“Every Website is trying to offer some kind of experience to get people to do some kind of thing—to buy products, book a trip, etc.—and our belief is that the key to doing that is by understanding the reality,” Kevin Lindsay, senior director of product marketing for Adobe Target, told eWEEK. “We do that by looking at the data and using it to influence the experience in some way.”
Indeed, “people bail at some point, and with Target we work to improve the add-to-cart rate, or what we call the ATC.”
In the new Adobe Target, Adobe has expanded the data science in its personalization solutions. “We incorporate data science into the product so a marketer doesn’t have to be a data scientist or have a data scientist on their team,” Lindsay said.
Target delivers relevant products and content to users via machine learning to personalize recommendations and site experiences, he said.
One key new addition is the products Lifetime Value algorithm, or LTV, Lindsay said.
“We’re excited to announce a new algorithm that enhances personalization progressively across the ‘lifetime’ of a digital journey,” said Drew Burns, senior product marketing manager for Adobe Target, in a blog post on the enhanced product. “This will enable marketers to optimize for the most valuable conversion outcome, which could be three, four or even more visits into the journey. Adobe Target’s Lifetime Value (LTV) algorithm looks at an interaction and models against all possible future interactions when deciding on which content to show a customer. This addresses the more complex conversion use cases that are becoming the norm.”
In a separate post, Jason Hickey, a senior product marketing manager for Adobe, said of the LTV that Adobe Target now enables organizations to optimize against all possible future interactions, regardless of the number of interactions.
“This algorithm makes content decisions based on recorded interactions, events, and profile data,” Hickey said. “By aligning those inputs with potential trajectories and rewards associated, we get a comprehensive model for LTV. It’s incredibly beneficial for digital properties with a high quantity of returning visitors—the higher the ratio of return visitors, the better the algorithm performs.”
Meanwhile, Adobe also is providing enhanced integration between Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target for mobile app engagement. Adobe Analytics is the company’s predictive and real-time analytics solution. The integration enables users to act on insights quickly.
“By selecting Analytics as the data source for optimization reporting, mobile marketers and mobile analysts can collaborate with confidence in the data, and dig deep for engagement opportunities,” said Matt Asay, vice president of mobile for the Digital Marketing business at Adobe.
Burns noted that Target now features embedded conversion optimization capabilities “that take advantage of Adobe Analytics for unparalleled segmentation and reporting depth, plus new ‘super-audience’ features that enable targeting at a level of granularity not available through any other optimization product on the market.”
Moreover, Burns said Adobe Target for Mobile Apps now takes advantage of the enhanced segmentation and reporting available through Adobe Analytics.
“This means that Target can, too, tap into app metrics in Analytics and use them to target and personalize,” he said. “It also makes for deeper-level reporting on test success, allowing marketers to better delve into any number of ‘what if’ questions which, until now, might have evaded app marketers experiencing pressure to show a return on app investments. The Analytics/Target combination and integration represents the most robust app engagement solution available on the market.”
Adobe also introduced personalized A/B testing to Adobe Target, Hickey said. A/B testing is comparing two versions of a product or service—in this case, a Web page—to see which one performs better.
Hickey called the move Adobe’s “latest and greatest leap into data-driven marketing automation, to our testing-hungry audience. This enhancement allows marketers to move beyond content and dynamically deliver entire site experiences to visitors using personalization algorithms. Whereas auto-allocate focused on finding the best holistic experience and ensuring it got a bigger piece of the traffic pie, personalized A/B testing takes things even further, intelligently delivering the best experience to each user based on their highly predictive but still anonymous profile.”