Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. My name is Travis Jordan, Principal Product Manager at Adobe on the Experience Platform team. I thank you for joining us. Today we’re going to be diving into an exciting topic that’s transforming how businesses manage their data using real-time CDP connections. This powerful product enables customers to forward event data in real-time, server-side to any location. Throughout the session, we’ll explore how this product works, its key features, and the immense value it brings to your data management strategy. We’ll also talk you through some practical use cases and provide a live demo to show you its capabilities and actions. We have a lot to cover, so let’s go and get rolling. The deprecation of third-party cookies across browsers and devices is creating significant gaps in tracking capabilities for brands, leading to a reduced return on ad spend due to the inability of track, immediate performance, and personalized experience effectively. While companies like Meta and Google offer conversion APIs or CAPIs to mitigate this issue, these solutions are often complex, resource-intensive, and challenging to scale. Adobe real-time CDP connections addresses these issues by providing a plug-and-play event-forwarding solution that allows customers to easily and efficiently forward event data, server-side in real-time, ensuring scalable and streamlined data handling to maintain robust tracking and measurement capabilities. Let’s step back just for a minute. What is real-time CDP connections? In short, real-time CDP connections is an Adobe offering that enables you to collect, enrich, and forward event data, conversion data, real-time to non-Adobe destinations via server-side forwarding. Real-time CDP connections is a sub-brand of the Adobe Experience platform real-time CDP product portfolio. It can be purchased as a standalone product. It’s also included with real-time CDP Prime, and Ultimate offer All Editions. When you purchase real-time CDP connections, Prime or Ultimate, you gain access to event forwarding, as well as a monitoring tool which lets you track your monthly outgoing calls and review error logs. This package includes other foundational data collection products like tags, SDK extensions, Experience Edge network, and data streams. Together, these interconnected products enable you to collect and forward your web and mobile event data server-side, to both Adobe and non-Adobe destinations. Now let’s walk you through how this all works. On the left side of the visual, you will see that data is collected from your website or mobile device, or any other connected device using our robust and easy to implement SDKs. On the client, online conversion events such as Add to Cart, Video Watch, or App Launch are tracked and sent to the Experience Edge network. The Edge network is a globally distributed network and hosting environment that consolidates data from various digital channels, improving performance and enabling instant insights for personalized customer experiences. It integrates seamlessly with Adobe Experience Cloud products, and ensures robust data privacy and security. The Edge network is one of the greatest competitive advantages that we have with this product. From the Edge network, you can forward this data to any non-Adobe destination using server-side event forwarding. When I say any destination, I mean any destination that is prepared and ready to receive server-side data. For example, if you have a destination that leverages third-party cookies, and it does not ready for server-side type of interactions, we’re not able to leverage event forwarding for that. However, as vendors and as brands and as partners have the ability to receive data server-side, we are able to create extensions to be able to deliver those events to those locations. As you can see in the black box on the right side, this is server-side event forwarding or connections. Within this environment, a customer creates a property. Within that property, they can create a set of rules and conditions. As a part of that, they can also enrich some of the content, enrich some of the events before sending it onto the third-party location. Before doing that, we do have a capability called Secrets, which enables you to have authentication capabilities so that you have secure transmission between your data and the vendor or the partner. On the far most right, we have several solutions and several endpoints in which you can send your data. In the first bucket up top, you’ll see conversion APIs. We have conversion API extensions for LinkedIn, for Meta, for Google, for Snap, for TikTok, also for many others as well. Pinterest is the one that I was lacking, so we also have one for Pinterest as well. Now, we also enable you to send that data to a data warehouse. That may be your own data warehouse such as AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. And lastly, at the very bottom, if we do not have an out-of-the-box extension, you can use our cloud connector. The cloud connector is kind of a Swiss Army knife that enables you to send data to any location so long as it has the correct authentication capabilities and it accepts real-time server-side events. So this is for you just kind of an end-to-end flow of how real-time CDP connections works in the Adobe ecosystem. Let me walk through a couple of use cases. So I touched on them a little bit in this overview, but I want to go into each of these in a little bit more depth. Let’s dive into the first use case. Marketers, once again, as mentioned earlier, need a turnkey solution to handle event data server-side in real-time across ad platforms like Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snap, and many others. By delivering this data server-side rather than client-side pixels, it ensures that ads and attribution stay effective even as third-party cookies are phased out. Now, we recognize that cookie deprecation is put on hold a little bit further out with Google. So we know that many of the browsers today, including Safari, have already deprecated third-party cookies and no longer allow those. But with ad blockers and the eventual deprecation of third-party cookies in Google Chrome, this problem is persistent and this problem is an issue today and will only continue to get worse over time as browsers continue to adopt this model. So let’s take a look at how this works. Once again, this is kind of a different view of what I talked about earlier. Your data is collected via the web or mobile SDK on the client that is sent to the Edge network. Now with event forwarding, you create a set of rules and events and you install those extensions within event forwarding. And now within those event forwarding extensions, that data is sent to your third-party location, which enables you to have effective ads delivered to a consumer in a third-party cookieless world. Let’s walk through this use case with a scenario. I want to introduce you to Kim, a marketer persona. Kim is a marketer who manages media spend for her company. She builds a media plan and runs campaigns across many advertising environments. Kim has always relied on third-party cookies and pixels to track when conversions happen from her campaigns. Kim has always met performance goals such as return on ad spend. That’s Kim happy. So in this new world, as more browsers and devices have blocked third-party cookies, including client-side pixels and beacons for tracking, Kim is now unable to track most of her campaign performance. Kim sees a significant impact on her ad spend and performance. Kim is no longer happy as this affects many of her targets and her marketing goals. I’m sure that many of you can relate with some of what Kim is currently going through. Okay, now without this data on what users do after they click on the ad, the ad platform is not able to improve its performance by targeting users with similar profiles and those who have converted and brands are unable to accurately track conversions. In fact, one source says that many marketers will have to spend up to 25% more just to achieve the same results they did in 2021. The problem only increases as marketing budgets are being scrutinized and even reduced. So let’s fast forward a little bit further. So recently in the last couple of years, to no surprise, the industry has responded. Solutions, well, kind of, right? Advertising platforms like Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and Snap have introduced conversion APIs or Cappies. This enables brands to forward event data to end destinations using server-side rather than client-side. This is good progress, but it doesn’t get us all the way there. Let me explain. The challenge is that this is simply not a scalable approach. If a brand wants to implement Cappies, once again, conversion APIs across multiple vendors, they’re forced to implement each of these one by one. This can be very time-consuming and costly as it requires a technical resource many times to read and study the documentation for each of these end points and then implement these across their own servers one by one. Once again, this simply is not a scalable solution. For example, each conversion API can take up to four weeks to implement, depending on the technical capabilities and the resourcing available. On average, we find that most brands need to migrate at least eight walled garden destinations from client-side to server-side. As mentioned, this work requires IT support to implement and to make regular updates each time the SDK is updated by the vendor. This happens a lot. Something as simple as tracking a different or a new conversion event would require IT to make changes across each conversion API. Once again, this is simply not scalable. This is where CDP Connections comes into play. Realtime CDP Connections addresses these challenges by providing a plug and play event forwarding solution that allows customers to easily and efficiently forward event data server-side in real time, ensuring scalable and streamlined data, handling to maintain robust tracking and measurement capabilities, even in a third party cookulous world. This makes Kim happy. Okay, let’s dive into use case number two. For use case number two, we’re looking at more of a technical persona, maybe a data scientist or an engineer or an IT manager. This use case is quite a bit different from the previous use case that we discussed, but equally as important and urgent to many of our customers today. In this use case, customers want to securely collect, enrich and send event data server-side real time to their own internal data warehouse. That might be an AWS instance, S3 bucket, that may be an Azure location, that may also be somewhere in Google Cloud Platform and BigQuery. So these are some of the locations and some of the existing infrastructure instances in which customers want to send their data server-side. So what does this enable? Well, this enables customers to be able to activate personalized experiences, feed their AI machine learning algorithms and deliver rich analytics and insights. Now let’s look at how this works. Once again, very similar to what we shared previously, customers are able to collect the event data via the web or mobile SDK, or you can also use the server API. That data is sent to the edge network and then the edge network sends that data to event forwarding. Within event forwarding, you can install the appropriate extensions and set the appropriate rules and conditions so that that data is streamed real time server-side. And once again, that allows brands to be able to deliver dashboards, analytics reports, or even activate personalized experiences using AI and machine learning and other personalization capabilities. Let’s take a minute just to walk through a few of the product highlights. First and foremost, real-time CDP connections offers a robust extension catalog. We have dozens of out-of-the-box extensions available today with many, many more around the corner. My development team is working hard and working fast and furious to deliver extensions as server-side endpoints become available for some of the major partners and vendors. Now let’s say an extension does not exist. If that extension does not exist, no worries. We offer the Adobe Cloud Connector extension. This is kind of, once again, a Swiss army knife and enables customers to be able to configure and to be able to forward data to any endpoint that is available to receive real-time data server-side. We’re able to send data to that location using the Adobe Cloud Connector extension. This is available to you today. And Meta Conversions API is by far one of the most popular extensions that we offer. Because of that, we have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy with our partnership with Meta to ensure that we deliver one, a fantastic extension, and two, a really nice onboarding experience to ensure that customers get up and going with the Meta Conversions API fast. And I’ll talk about that in just a minute. Okay, let me highlight a couple of other features that you can see within Realtime CDP Connections. Customers are able to control your data, right? We find one of the major concerns or questions customers have is with a client-side implementation, they feel like they lose control over that data. It goes straight from that computer or that device, that mobile app, straight to that end destination. It doesn’t provide a lot of control, right? So within Realtime CDP Connections, we insert the edge network and we also insert event forwarding. That gives you the ability to create rules, to create conditions so that you control where your data goes and you control that with specific rules and conditions. Realtime CDP Connections is built and designed to satisfy the simple use cases, but also the most complex use cases, all within a very simple UI. As mentioned previously, Realtime CDP Connections also provides the ability for customers to enrich that payload, to transform that payload and send it to its final destination. This is really helpful. Customers maybe want to enrich their event data with CRM data before it goes to meta, for example. And event forwarding enables you to do that, to perform that transformation. Another key feature is our publishing workflow. We offer a robust publishing workflow, which enables marketing and IT teams to work together. There are different levels of permissions that are important for the publishing workflow, specifically the develop role, the approve role and the publishing roles. Now let’s get started. Let me show you a few features that you might expect to run into as you get started with event forwarding. So if you first start event forwarding, you’ll see an overview video, you’ll see links to documentation, and then you’ll be presented with two options. The first is the guided setup option, which is ideal for new customers who have not implemented the tags, Metapixel extension and or the web SDK. This guided resource automates hundreds of steps and reduces implementation time from hours to minutes. Or you can select the flexible setup option, which is ideal for tech savvy customers who have already implemented tags and or the web SDK. Now I wanna mention that the guided setup for meta conversions API also provides a foundation for you so that you can easily add additional extensions on top of that. So you may look at that and go, yeah, I want the meta conversions API, but I also want others as well. But once you’ve implemented this with the guided setup, you’ll be able to add additional extensions to that implementation very easily. I also wanna mention that the guided setup for meta conversions API is in a beta format. We will be releasing this to GA this year, which will significantly enhance the experience. Additionally, it will provide customers with the ability to be able to add upon an existing implementation, an existing web SDK implementation, an existing tags implementation, or even an existing event forward implementation. So to provide a lot more flexibility for you to set up the meta conversion APIs within various circumstances for the customer. All right, here’s the exciting part. We’re gonna take just a minute to provide a brief demo on how to quickly install the meta conversions API extension using the guided setup in real time CDP connections that I just mentioned. Hi, I’m Travis Jordan from the Adobe product team. I’m also here with Daniel Abramovici from the meta engineering team. We are excited to share with you how meta and Adobe have partnered together to deliver a turnkey solution to implement meta conversions API using Adobe server side of affording in real time CDP connections. Meta built the conversions API to help advertisers continue to rely on our technologies for the performance they’re used to. It can help take your marketing to the next level, gain a competitive advantage, and become best in class data-driven marketers. The conversion API creates a direct connection between your marketing data and the systems which help optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per action, and measure results across meta technologies. And since the conversions API is less dependent on browser technologies than the meta pixel, it can help both enhance how you use your data to improve performance today and resiliency for your users. And resiliency for the future. This new capability that we’ll demonstrate today offers the following benefits for customers. Number one, it helps enterprises re-architect their advertising programs by leveraging modern, privacy ready solutions for targeting and personalization. Number two, this solution helps organizations to rapidly implement the meta conversions API. With just a few simple steps, customers are now able to start sending events to meta for ad conversions server-side in real time. For this demo, we’re going to demonstrate how to quickly install the meta conversions API on a new property in Adobe Realtime CDP Connections to optimize ad conversions for basic web events. We will demonstrate a new tool co-developed by meta and Adobe that automates hundreds of steps and reduces the setup time from hours to minutes and significantly improving the time to value for customers. Let’s go ahead and get started. We’re here on the digital experience homepage. I’m going to go ahead and click data collection. And now I’m on the home screen of data collection. I’m going to go ahead and click get started under send conversions data to meta. And there we go. The initial setup is now complete. Let’s go and click the next button to implement the code on our site. Here, you simply copy the code and paste it into your website. Okay, I’ve now copied the code to my website. Now that I’ve done that, I’m ready to start the validation. Now let’s go ahead and click start validation to ensure that everything was set up and everything is working out. Now, I’m going to go ahead and click start validation to ensure that everything is set up and everything is working as anticipated. So from here, I’m going to go ahead and click send page event just to test to ensure that event is properly firing. And there you go. Now you can see three things have happened. Number one, the event is now being sent from my website. Number two, a basic page view event has been received and is being sent to the Adobe Experience Edge network. And lastly, and most importantly, the page view event is being received by Meta Conversions API. Let’s go ahead and click next to continue and wrap this up. Congratulations, your initial setup is now complete. Now let’s see this in action. As you recall, I have two events that I want to send to Meta. The first one is a page view event. The second one is a page view event. The second one is a page view event. The second one is a page view event. As you recall, I have two events that I want to send to Meta. Number one, a page view event, and number two, a contact event that is activated when a form is submitted. Let’s fire off these events from a demo customer site right now. So I’ll go ahead and refresh the page and that should fire off my page view event. I will also go ahead and enter this information in this form and go ahead and click send. Now this event data has been processed real time and sent to Meta for ad conversions. I will now hand it off to Daniel for Meta, who will show you this working in Meta’s Events Manager. After the configuration in real time CDP connections, we are now able to see the events on Meta’s Events Manager. These events are customer actions on the advertiser website, transmitted both the upload browser with the tag extension that utilizes Meta Pixel, as well as via the server with the events forwarding extension that utilizes Meta Conversions’ API. This way you follow the best practice of setting up the Conversions API with the Meta Pixel in a redundant way. Leveraging both sides of this configuration, you can help strengthen the reliability of data you share, thus helping decrease cost per action, as Conversions API allows you to share website events that the Pixel may lose due to network connectivity issues or page loading errors. Also, Meta Conversions API can be used to share other types of important events and data that occurs offline at a later time that the Pixel cannot. As you have seen in the configuration part, we have added the events page view and contact to Adobe real-time CDP connections, and can see those events in our Events Manager, thus informing the advertiser on what might be the best advertising solution. Note that the events show up with both the browser and server connection methods, meaning we are fully leveraging the Pixel plus Conversions API integration. Now that you have both browser and server events on Meta’s platform, they help improve attribution and optimization of our existing conversion campaigns, thus decreasing cost per action by providing better targeting capabilities. With the audiences created, we can create ads that leverage the events as the objectives of the campaigns. By using these events for both the audiences and the objectives, we can guarantee effectiveness in ads deliberately in a seamless manner. This concludes our demo on how to quickly install the Meta Conversions API on a new property in Adobe real-time CDP connections to optimize ad conversions for basic web events. To learn more about how to get started with Meta Conversions API and the Quick Start workflow in real-time CDP, reach out to your Adobe or Meta representative today. Thank you. All right, welcome back from the demo. Hopefully that was helpful for you to see the product in action and specifically see how to quickly get up and going with the Meta Conversions API extension with an event forwarding. Great, now we will wrap up with just a couple of items. First of all, as we conclude, I wanna provide a summary of some of the core benefits of real-time CDP connections and what it has to offer. Number one, it provides near real-time to real-time transfer of data for personalization and activation. The rapid implementation of turnkey extensions with Quick Start workflows, as I demonstrated. It also leverages the globally distributed edge network for redundancy and accuracy. This delivers an environment with no downtime and the great part about this is we do the maintenance and support for you on the server. Real-time CDP connections also offer simple tools such as rules, conditions and properties to help you filter, enrich and forward your data. And this includes easy updates by marketing teams without touching any code. We also deliver a single environment to manage and forward data to multiple CAPI’s and other destinations. And these are scalable to web, mobile and other IoT device connected devices. Oh, and by implementing connections, future integrations with other Adobe products are made much easier because you’ve already accomplished two of the steps needed for implementations. The installation of the web SDK and also the setup and configuration of the edge network. Lastly, most importantly, consent is built into the product. We can collect the intent and you can decide what to do with that data. This gives you better control of your data and with server-side rules and configurations. Lastly, and this is the exciting part, as you get started on your journey, I want to highlight an exciting opportunity. We are currently offering a no cost real-time CDP connection workshop to select customers. This is a three-part series that features live hands-on sessions with 25 to 30 minute sessions of Q&A. And this enables you to have access to real-time CDP connections for 30 days. If you’re interested in participating in the workshop, go ahead and just contact your Adobe representative and we will get you enrolled in the next session of the workshop. Okay, this brings us to the QA portion of our session. There are a few questions we can go ahead and answer that we find to be very common among our customers. Number one, which Adobe offerings include event forwarding? Once again, as mentioned previously, if you purchase real-time CDP connections, real-time CDP prime or ultimate, all of those include even forwarding the product in which we demoed today. Another question we receive commonly from customers is the following. Many customers ask us what prerequisites exist to using event forwarding. There’s just a few. When we touched on those previously, number one, you do need to implement the web SDK to collect your data. So if you’re currently collecting data using some of the older extensions within tags, that would need to be updated to using the web SDK. That’s probably the primary requirement to get started with real-time CDP connections or event forwarding. What extensions are available in event forwarding? I think I covered that previously. We will provide a link to some resources that would give you the full list of all the extensions that are available to you today. In fact, you can see here that was just made available to you, number three is event forwarding extensions. So if you click that link, you’ll be able to see the full catalog. And once again, as a reminder, we have delivered the Adobe Cloud Connector extension that acts as like Postman on the edge, enables you to forward that event data to really any server-side endpoint, as long as it’s able to accept real-time data. Okay, oftentimes another question we get is one around testing and validation. Customers wanna know, hey, how can I validate that my implementation was done correctly? What type of testing tools are available to help me ensure this is working? We offer three products that help with that. Number one, the monitoring tool, like I mentioned before, will show you errors with your implementation. Number two, we also have the debugger tool, which will show you your payload and kind of what’s happening end to end. As you collect your data from the web SDK and send it to the edge and then onto your third-party destination, you’ll be able to have some visibility in what’s happening with that data using Experience Platform Debugger. And integrated with Debugger is also another tool called Assurance. Assurance also enables you to kind of double-click and go even deeper into what’s happening with your implementation and your events. And lastly, we often receive questions about enrichment, and we covered that previously. Yes, you can enrich your data before you send it on to Google or Meta or AWS or whatever else with any type of online or offline data that you want to access. And so once again, using the Cloud Connector and a set of rules and events, you can enrich that data and then forward that along to your desired destination. So those are just a few of kind of the common questions that we have. So we will go ahead and move forward and wrap this up. And once again, as a reminder, I want to point you towards the resources that you see above. Feel free to access those to get started with Realtime CDP Connections and event forwarding. I just want to thank you for joining today’s webinar on Realtime CDP Connections. We hope that you found this session insightful and informative. We provided an overview of the product. We explored practical use cases and provided a prerecorded demo to help you better understand how this product works and how you can drive better engagement with your customers in a third party cookie in this world.