Destination types and categories

Last update: 2024-08-05
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Read this page to understand the different types and categories of Adobe Experience Platform destinations.

Destination types

In Adobe Experience Platform, we distinguish between different destination types - connections, dataset exports, and extensions. There are several types of connection destinations, allowing you to export data to API-based destinations, social destinations, CRM platforms, and many more.

Finally, connections can also be distinguished between public destinations available across all organizations in the destinations catalog, and private destinations which Real-Time CDP Ultimate customers can create to satisfy their specific export use cases.

Types of destinations diagram.

Connections

Profile Export, Streaming Audience Export, and Edge Personalization destinations in Adobe Experience Platform capture event data, combine it with other data sources to form the Real-Time Customer Profile, apply segmentation, and export audiences and qualified profiles to destinations.

Profile export destinations

Profile export destinations receive raw data, often with email address as the primary key. Experience Platform currently supports two types of profile export destinations:

Advanced enterprise destinations (streaming profile export destinations)

IMPORTANT

Advanced enterprise destinations, or streaming profile export destinations, are available to Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform Ultimate customers only.

Use the advanced enterprise destination data connectors to deliver Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform profiles in near real-time to internal systems or to other third-party systems for data synchronization, analysis, and further profile enrichment use cases.

These destinations receive audience and profile data as Experience Platform data streams.

Advanced enterprise destinations include:

Batch (file-based) destinations

File-based destinations receive .csv files containing profiles and/or attributes. Amazon S3 is an example of a destination where you can export files containing profile exports.

Streaming audience export destinations

Audience export destinations receive Experience Platform audience data. These destinations use audience IDs or user IDs. Advertising and social destinations like Google Display & Video 360, Google Ads, or Facebook are examples of such destinations.

Edge personalization destinations

Edge personalization destinations in Experience Platform include Adobe Target and the Custom personalization destination. By using these destinations, you can enable same-page and next-page personalization use cases for your customers.

Read more about how to configure personalization destinations for same-page and next-page personalization.

Profile export and audience export destinations - video overview

The video below runs you through the particularities of the two types of destinations:

 Transcript

Hello everyone! Join me for this high level overview of destinations in the real time customer data platform. First, where to destinations fit in the picture of the real time CDP. data collection and to experience platform from different channels happens first, then profile management activities and consent policies determine how data can be sent to different types of destinations. The activation process uses destinations to support downstream marketing activities that use profiles and audiences. So what’s the destination? Simply, there are pre-built integrations that use friendly workflows for exporting data from the real time CDP to both Adobe and external partners. The end goal is to deliver personalized experiences as audiences fall into several categories and align with different versions of the real time CDP destinations support these different audience types. For example, people audiences align with the B2C version, and you can extend your reach by leveraging third party prospect profiles. Conversely, account audiences align with the B2B version. To access pre-built integrations, go to the Destinations Catalog. In the user interface, they’re grouped by types and categories, and they cover many different marketing needs. In addition to pre-built destinations, we offer the Experience Platform Destination SDK. This consists of APIs that can be used to create new destination integrations. You have the option of making these public or private. Now I’ll review destination types and supported data transfer methods. At the highest level, a destination is classified as a connection or extension. Connections use guided workflows to activate data, whereas extensions are added to Adobe Tags and the forward event data to third parties from your digital properties. Connections are further classified as public or private. Public connections are mostly available to everyone except where special licensing is needed. In some cases, private connections are created using the destination SDK. These may not be available to everyone as far as data export methods. Some destinations support batch while others support streaming. Another method uses the experienced platform edge network to support on site personalization and advertising. Now let’s dive into the different types of data export workflows. This is also referred to as activation. Some destinations export both audience and profile data. Profile data is considered first party data. Use these for marketing activities like personalized email and offline campaigns, provided the data usage policies permit using the data in that way. Destinations that support this type of export use a special workflow where both audiences and attributes are selected. Some supports streaming and others batch delivery. Some destinations allow only audience data to be exported. They don’t allow any first party data, such as profile data, to be sent. Typically, there are additional requirements for ID matching based on hashed identifiers or ID syncs. These destinations support offsite marketing initiatives like social media campaigns and retargeting on demand side platforms. The destination workflow is tailored to be specific to the platform where the data is sent. Data export destinations use cloud storage to export experience platform data sets. While there are other ways to do this. This is ideal for less technical people. They don’t require coding like APIs do. A typical use case is analyzing data and tools outside of experience. Platform. These destinations use batch file based exports. They involve raw data sets. They’re not grouped or structured by audiences or profile attributes like the other data export destinations we reviewed. Examples include Marketo, measure, Amazon S3, and Google Cloud Storage. Edge personalization destinations use edge segmentation to evaluate audiences instantly. The primary use cases are same and next page personalization on web and mobile experiences. The Platform Edge network is leveraged for these destinations. The web SDK, mobile SDK or Edge Network Server API must be used depending on the destination. Both audience and profile attributes can be sent subject to your data usage policies. Some examples of edge personalization destinations include Adobe Target and Custom personalization. Last hour review extensions. These are distinct from connections. They’re used for forwarding event based data directly to third party systems from Adobe Tags. Tags is a data collection solution used for capturing online behavioral data into Adobe Solutions, and it’s also used for this purpose. Extensions use the experienced platform Edge network, which is a server side solution. They support a variety of use cases and external partners. Examples include Facebook, pixel, Google Ads, and Google Universal Analytics, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. This concludes the destinations overview video. I hope this provides you with a good, high level understanding of the types of destinations in the real time CDP. Thanks and good luck.

Types of exported audiences

You can export three types of audiences from Experience Platform to various destinations:

  • People audiences
  • Account audiences
  • Prospect audiences

Learn more about the various audience types.

A symbol on the destination card shows which types of audiences you can export to each destination.

Example destination card with symbols showing which audience types can be exported.

Dataset export destinations

Some cloud storage destinations in the destinations catalog support dataset exports. Use these destinations to export raw datasets to cloud storage locations.

Read more about how to export datasets.

Extensions

Platform leverages the power and flexibility of tag management, allowing you to configure tag extensions in the UI.

TIP

For detailed information about tag extensions, including use cases and how to find them in the interface, see the tag extensions overview.

Tag extensions forward raw event data to several types of destinations. Think of extensions as an Event Forwarding type of destination. This is a simpler type of integration with destination platforms, which only forwards raw event data. Examples of those are the Gainsight personalization extension or the Confirmit Voice of the Customer extension.

Tag extensions compared to other destinations

When to use connections and extensions

As a marketer, you could use a combination of connections and extensions to address your use cases.

Connections are useful when it’s necessary to leverage a complete centralized customer profile or a customer audience for activation. For example, use connections if you are joining behavioral data from an analytics system with uploaded CRM data to qualify a user for a given audience before delivering a personalized message to that user.

Extensions are helpful when event data is used to trigger an action, or to conduct segmentation in an external environment. For example, if behavioral data needs to be forwarded to an external system without being joined to other data sources on file for a given user.

Destination categories

The connections and extensions in the destinations catalog are grouped by destination category (Advertising, Cloud storage, Survey platforms, Email marketing, etc.), depending on the marketing action that they help you achieve. For more information on each of the categories, as well as the destinations included in each category, see the Destinations catalog documentation.

Destination categories highlighted in the catalog page.

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