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Engage and acquire new customers without dependency on third-party cookies
- This functionality is available to customers who have licensed Real-Time CDP (App Service), Adobe Experience Platform Activation, Real-Time CDP, Real-Time CDP Prime, Real-Time CDP Ultimate. Read more about these packages in the product descriptions and contact your Adobe representative for more information.
Use third party data support in Real-Time CDP to expand your profile base with prospect profiles from data partners and engage with them to acquire or reach new customers.
Why consider this use case
Brands are simultaneously facing daunting challenges of responsibly executing top-of-the-funnel customer acquisition use-cases without dependency on third-party cookies, limited budgets, and higher demand on transparency and return on ad-spend.
Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform can help brands safely transition their Data Management Platform (DMP) supported use-cases to cookie-less alternatives and do so in a way that brings forward the full sophistication and power of self-serve segmentation, audience curation, and activation into a single system. All without compromising on Adobe’s unwavering focus on responsible use of data via a patented data governance and consent framework.
For example, follow the steps described in this use case when you need to run a campaign to attract prospects to become users or known customers.
Prerequisites and planning
As you consider reaching out to and acquiring new customers, consider the following prerequisites in your planning process:
- What is the cadence with which you expect partner-provided profiles to be ingested into Real-Time CDP and refreshed?
- What identities do your downstream destinations require?
- Ensure that the identifiers ingested are actionable downstream
- Is the partner data that you are ingesting tied to a widely accepted durable identifier, such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII), hashed PII, or a partner identifier?
- What data usage policies do you need be aware of from the partner perspective and from your own legal, privacy, or compliance team?
How to achieve the use case: high-level overview
Before you expand Real-Time CDP to engage and acquire new customers, make sure to use Real-Time CDP to build a robust foundation for your first-part data. The workflows to achieve this use case are similar to workflows to engage with your known customers.
- As a customer, you license prospect profiles from one or more data partners to help drive top of the funnel customer acquisition.
- As a customer, you extend your profile data and governance model to ingest the partner-provided list of prospect profiles.
- As a customer, you load prospect profiles into Real-Time CDP and build governance policies to ensure responsible use.
- As a customer, you build focused audiences from the list of prospect profiles.
- As a customer, you activate prospect audiences to destinations which are accepting of the identities available in your prospect list.
- If needed, work with the data partner for last-mile activation of audiences to desired paid-media destinations.
Video walkthrough
View the video tutorial below for a walkthrough of how to reach and engage prospect audiences:
Transcript
In this video, I’ll review the use cases for partner data support in the real-time customer data profile with specific focus on the pre-visit, off-site prospecting use case. These are the topics I’ll cover. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to review the Partner Data Support Overview video that provides a good background on the deprecation of third-party cookies and the emergence of newer technologies to support the key use cases impacted. Data partners have had several years to pivot their technology to fill some of the gaps as a byproduct of third-party cookie deprecation. The good news is that key acquisition and enrichment use cases can be supported by both data partners and Adobe’s real-time CDP in this new era of cookie lists. There are separate videos that cover each of these use cases in depth. This video focuses on off-site prospecting of new customers. I’ll start with showing a diagram and explaining the workflow for this use case. It starts with some initial planning, such as the number and cadence of prospect profiles you expect from the data partner, which identities you’ll require downstream, and whether these identities are tied to widely accepted, durable identifiers. Once that part is figured out, there’s licensing to address between you and the data partner. After the licensing, the partner builds the prospect list based on your requirements. Steps 3 through 6 represent the workflow in the real-time CDP. You’ll use familiar workflows for data modeling, ingestion, profile creation, audience building, and audience activation to destinations accepting partner IDs. Now I’ll hop into the experience platform and show you how to handle the implementation of this use case. I’ll start with identities. There’s a specific identity namespace to be used for partner data called partner ID, as you can see here. Because partner identifiers are based on probabilistic models and are subject to churn, they are kept separate from the identity graph in real-time CDP. The intent of this use case is to acquire new customers, and some of the prospects will become customers. So in effect, we want to keep these profiles separate from the deterministic or first-party profiles. I’ll cancel out of this modal, and I’ll show you the identity that has already been created in my instance of platform for a partner data source. Next, I’ll discuss data modeling, specifically the XDM and schema that will be used for the data partner source for this use case. I’ll select Create Schema in the upper right corner, then Browse. I’ll filter the class by partner. When I do this, I see the XDM individual prospect profile class. This is exactly the class I want to choose for this schema and this use case. This schema allows you to ingest partner profiles that are treated separately from first-party data profiles. I’ll select this from the list, and then I’ll select Assign Class at the top right. Now I’ll add a field group to my new schema. I’ll filter this list by partner. Adobe provides a predefined field group, or you can create your own. I’ll select the first field group, and we’ll look at the fields in the preview first. Looks good, I’ll add this to the field group. All the partner profiles are found under this node right here. There are additional nodes for industry-specific attributes, as you can see here. Further down is the partner ID. This is the field you’ll want to mark as the primary identity for this schema. There’s only a single identity namespace option available. That’s because our system is designed to ensure there’s no mixing of prospect profiles with first-party profiles, so it’s a nice guardrail. I’ll cancel out of the schema creation workflow, and I’ll show you an existing schema, which is like the one I’ve been building right now. As you can see, it’s set up like the schema I just showed you in the workflow, and the partner ID is set as the identifier. Also, the schema is enabled for profile. Considering the type of data used for this use case, and all the partner data sources for that matter, data governance is a crucial element. I’ll select policies under privacy. Now, toward the bottom of the labels list, there’s a predefined third-party item for partner ecosystem. This is what you’ll want to use to restrict the marketing actions for partner data sources. Now I’ll go back to the schema we just reviewed. I’ll select the labels link at the top, and the third-party policy has been applied to all the field group nodes for partner attributes. Now that the schema and data governance labels are in place, it’s time to create a dataset. One has already been created in my experience platform instance, so we’ll take a look at it. Once in the dataset, I’ll select the last 30 days to see more activity. I noticed some uploads on July 24th and 25th, and below I can see the status of the batches. This is the same as viewing batches for other types of datasets in experience platform. I’ll click through one of them to see the details. Okay, so we’re ready to ingest the partner data. We can use any file-based pathway to get partner data into platform. I’ll show you where these are in the interface. First, I’ll go to sources under connections. When I click on cloud storage, it advances to the available connectors for that category. You’d more than likely be using an S3 right here, or at the end of this group there’s an option for SFTP. From workflows, you can select map CSV to XDM schema if you’re working with small files or if you’re testing. I’ll launch the workflow to show you what that looks like. On the detail step, make sure you choose the correct dataset name. On the next step, you can either choose a file on your computer or drag and drop one to the drop zone right here. After that, you’d go through a mapping step, but I’m going to cancel out of this workflow since I won’t be ingesting new partner data. Let’s jump to viewing prospect profiles. To reinforce Adobe’s commitment to separate third-party profiles from first-party profiles, a dedicated accordion menu exists. It’s labeled prospects. I’ll select profiles underneath. Next, I’ll select a profile ID to view the content, so it works similarly to the profile viewer for your first-party profiles except that it’s limited to just partner profiles. Another distinction for partner profiles is that our system applies an automatic time-to-live cadence to this data. Every 25 days, the prospect profiles are deleted from the system to ensure data partners refresh the data regularly. One of the key benefits to managing partner prospect profiles in real-time CDP is to centralize your audience strategy in a single system. Like prospect profiles, prospect audiences are kept separate from your first-party audiences. I’ll select audiences under prospects. Once that loads, the existing audiences display in the browse list. I’ll select create audience in the top right to show you that the experience for creating new audiences here is the same as it is in other locations. The main difference you’ll notice, that is if you create audiences on your first-party profiles, is that these are based solely on the prospect profile and not the XDM customer profile or individual profile. I’ll expand this and then expand the USAAM node. From here, I can drag and drop a partner attribute to the builder canvas and define it. I’ll cancel out of here since I’m not creating a new partner audience. Last, we can activate the audience. I’ll select a pre-configured S3 account that’s used explicitly for partner audience activation. Next, I’ll select activate audiences from the three-picker menu next to it. On the select audiences step in the workflow, only prospect audiences display. I’ll also mention that this respects the data usage policy I applied earlier, third-party. The remaining workflow is the same in terms of scheduling and mapping. After that, daily batch jobs will be sent out. I’ll cancel out of this since I won’t be activating my audience. This concludes the workflow for implementing the offsite prospecting use case in the real-time CDP. Hopefully, you feel confident getting this set up for your organization. Thanks and good luck!
How to achieve the use case: Step-by-step instructions
Read through the sections below which include links to further documentation, to complete each of the steps in the high-level overview above.
UI functionality and elements that you will use
As you complete the steps to implement the use case, you will make use of the following Real-Time CDP functionality and UI elements (listed in the order in which you will use them). Make sure that you have the necessary attribute-based access control permissions for all these areas or ask your system administrator to grant you the necessary permissions.
- Identities
- Schemas
- Data usage labels
- Datasets
- Sources
- Prospect profiles
- Prospect audiences
- Destinations
License third-party profile details from the partner
This step is covered in the prerequisites and Adobe assumes that you have the right contractual agreements in place with trusted data vendors to ingest prospect profiles provided by the data partner.
Extend your profile data and governance model to accommodate partner-provided prospect profiles
In preparation to receive prospect profiles from your data partner, you must extend your data management framework in Real-Time CDP to accommodate this new profile type.
The identity, data management, and governance components that you will be using are:
- A new Partner ID identity type for the partner-provided profiles
- A new XDM Individual Prospect Profile XDM class
- (Documentation coming soon) Field groups tailored to partner data support
- (Documentation coming soon) Third party labels which you will add on the attributes coming in from partners
Create a Partner ID identity namespace
Begin by creating a new identity type for the profiles that you will be receiving from the partner. To do this, in the Identity section, you must create a new identity namespace of the type Partner ID.
- Read more about Partner ID namespaces in the identity types section.
- Read about how to define identity fields in the Experience Platform user interface.
Create a new schema with the XDM Individual Prospect Profile class
Next, in Data Management > Schemas, create a new schema and assign it the XDM Individual Prospect Profile class.
Read how to create and edit schemas in the UI and get complete information about the XDM Individual Prospect Profile class (link upcoming).
The XDM Individual Prospect Profile class comes pre-configured with the fields shown below. To enrich your schema with partner-provided attributes for the prospect profiles, you can either create a new field group with the attributes that you expect and add it to the schema, or you can use one of the pre-configured field groups provided by Adobe.
Next, you must select the partnerID identity that you created earlier as the primary identity for the schema. Profile records must carry a primary identifier. This step is required to make sure that prospect data can be loaded into the Profile store and made available for segmentation and activation.
Prospect profiles are automatically restricted to only use ID namespaces of the Partner ID type. This is by design and ensures clean separation between your first-party and prospect profiles.
Note that the schema is not yet enabled for profile. Toggle the profile button to enable this schema for inclusion in the profile service. For more information about enabling the schema for use in Real-Time Customer Profile, read the create schema tutorial.
Add the third-party data governance label to all fields in the schema
Consider adding third-party data governance labels to all of the fields that make up the schema. This is important in order to ensure responsible use of third-party data and minimize the risk of data leakage. Find more information about third-party data governance labels.
To do this, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to the schema you created and select the Labels tab.
- Select all the fields in this schema using the checkbox button at the very top and then click the pencil icon on the right to apply data governance labels to this schema.
- Select the Partner Ecosystem Label from the categories on the left.
- Choose the label called Third Party and select Save.
- Notice that all the fields in the schema now carry the label you selected in the previous step.
Your schema is now ready to use and you can proceed to the next step to ingest prospect data from your data partner.
Also in this step, think about how your data governance model changes as you expand your data management strategy to include third-party data provided by the partner. Explore the considerations in the documentation links below:
- (Coming soon) Keep third-party data in a separate dataset so that deleting it and undoing integrations is easy.
- (Coming soon) Use the dataset expiration functionality on the dataset for clients who purchased the data hygiene add-on.
- (Coming soon) Exercise caution when creating derived datasets which pull in third-party data, because once mixed together the only solution to remove the third-party data is to delete the whole derived dataset.
Load the list of prospect profiles and inspect the prospect profiles view
After you have your data model prepared for managing prospect profiles, it is time to ingest data.
Create a dataset and load sample prospect data
To load some sample data and populate prospect profiles, create a dataset and upload a file that you received from the data partner. Complete the steps below:
- Navigate to Data Management > Datasets and select Create dataset.
- Select Create dataset from schema
- Select the schema that you created in a previous step
- Give your dataset a name and optionally a description.
- Select Finish.
Note that similar to the step to create a schema, you need to enable the dataset to be included in the Real-Time Customer Profile. For more information about enabling the dataset for use in Real-Time Customer Profile, read the create schema tutorial.
To load a file that you received from the partner into the dataset, select the dataset, scroll down in the right rail, and select Add data. You can drag drop your file or select Choose files to navigate to the file location and select it.
After loading the list of profiles from the data partner into Real-Time CDP, proceed to the Inspect the loaded prospect profiles section to check that the prospect profiles are populating in the UI.
Ingest prospect data through source connectors
You can set up recurrent file imports to ingest data from the partner through a source connector and bring the list of prospect profiles into Real-Time CDP.
Some recommended source connectors for this purpose are listed below but note that any file-based ingestion method into Real-Time CDP works for your purpose.
After loading the list of profiles from the data partner into Real-Time CDP, proceed to the next section to check that the prospect profiles are populating in the UI.
Inspect the loaded prospect profiles
To see the list of prospect profiles, navigate to Prospects > Profiles in the left rail.
Note that it might take up to two hours for the prospect profiles you just loaded into Real-Time CDP to show in the Browse view of the Prospect Profile screen. If the page displays the message “There are no prospect profiles to browse right now”, please try again after some time. After some wait, prospect profiles should start to show up in the Browse view.
Note the presence of the Identity Namespace column. If you’re working with multiple data vendors, use this column to infer the origin of prospect profiles.
You can also select any prospect profile for further inspection, as shown below.
Read more about prospect profiles.
Create prospect audiences
Use the segmentation functionality in Real-Time CDP to create audiences from your prospect profiles. Use desired segmentation rules to create tailored audiences.
To get started and build audiences composed of prospect profiles, navigate to Prospects > Audiences.
Note that the audience building experience for prospect profiles differs from the experience to build audiences from your known, first party customers. This view is limited to:
- Attributes from the prospect class that you created earlier.
- Batch profile evaluation only.
- Does not support building audiences based on time-series events.
Read more about prospect audiences.
Activate prospect profiles to destinations
Make use of the prospect audiences by exporting them to destinations. Currently, only certain cloud storage destinations support activation of prospect profiles.
Read more about activating prospects to cloud storage destinations.
Other use cases achieved through partner data support
Explore further use cases enabled through partner data support in Real-Time CDP:
- Supplement first-party profiles with attributes from trusted data partners to improve your data foundation and gain new insights into your customer base and gain better audience optimization.
- Personalize onsite experiences for unknown visitors using partner-aided visitor recognition during the visit without the user authenticating or having prior history with your brand.
- Expanded activation of prospect profiles and prospect audiences to select destinations.
