Adobe Target Bulk Profile Update API

The Adobe Target Bulk Profile Update API lets you update user profiles for multiple visitors to a website in bulk using a batch file.

Using the Bulk Profile Update API, you can conveniently send detailed visitor profile data in the form of profile parameters for many users to Target from any external source. External sources can include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Point of Sale (POS) systems, which are not usually available on a web page.

Benefits of the Bulk Profile Update API

• No limit on the number of profile attributes.
• Profile attributes sent via the site can be updated via the API and the opposite way.

Caveats

• The size of the batch file must be less than 50 MB. In addition, the total number of rows should not exceed 500,000 rows per upload.
• Updates generally occur in under one hour, but might take as long as 24 hours to be reflected.
• There is no limit on the number or rows that you can upload over a period of 24 hours in subsequent batches. However, the ingestion process might be throttled during business hours to ensure that other processes run efficiently.
• Consecutive v2 batch update calls without mbox calls in between for the same thirdPartyIds override the properties updated in the first batch update call.
• Adobe does not guarantee that 100% of batch profile data will be onboarded and retained in Target and, thus, be available for use in targeting. In the current design, there is a possibility that a small percentage of data (up to 0.1% of large production batches) might not be onboarded or retained.

Batch file

To update profile data in bulk, create a batch file. The batch file is a text file with values separated by commas similar to the following sample file.

batch=pcId,param1,param2,param3,param4
123,value1
124,value1,,,value4
125,,value2
126,value1,value2,value3,value4

You reference this file in the POST call to Target servers to process the file. When creating the batch file, consider the following:

• The first row of the file must specify column headers.
• The first header should either be a pcId or thirdPartyId. The Marketing Cloud visitor ID is not supported. pcId is a Target-generated visitorID. thirdPartyId is an ID specified by the client application, which is passed to Target through an mbox call as mbox3rdPartyId. It must be referred to here as thirdPartyId.
• Parameters and values you specify in the batch file must be URL-encoded using UTF-8 for security reasons. Parameters and values can be forwarded to other edge nodes for processing through HTTP requests.
• The parameters must be in the format paramName only. Parameters are displayed in Target as profile.paramName.
• If you are using Bulk Profile Update API v2, you need not specify all parameter values for each pcId. Profiles are created for any pcId or mbox3rdPartyId that is not found in Target. If you are using v1, profiles are not created for missing pcIds or mbox3rdPartyIds.
• The size of the batch file must be less than 50 MB. In addition, the total number of rows should not exceed 500,000. This limit ensures that servers don’t get flooded with too many requests.
• You can send multiple files. However, the sum total of the rows of all the files that you send in a day should not exceed one million for each client.
• There is no restriction on the number of attributes you can upload. However, the total size of the external profile data, which includes Customer Attributes, Profile API, In-Mbox profile parameters, and Profile Script output, must not exceed 64 KB.
• Parameters and values are case-sensitive.

HTTP POST request

Make an HTTP POST request to Target edge servers to process the file. Here is a sample HTTP POST request for the file batch.txt using the curl command:

curl -X POST --data-binary @BATCH.TXT http://CLIENTCODE.tt.omtrdc.net/m2/CLIENTCODE/v2/profile/batchUpdate

Where:

BATCH.TXT is the filename. CLIENTCODE is the Target client code.

If you don’t know your client code, in the Target user interface click Administration > Implementation. The client code is shown in the Account Details section.

Inspect the response

The Profiles API returns the submission status of the batch for processing along with a link under “batchStatus” to a different URL that shows the overall status of the particular batch job.

Example API response

The following code snipped is an example of a Profiles API response:

<response>
    <success>true</success>
    <batchStatus>http://mboxedge45.tt.omtrdc.net/m2/demo/profile/batchStatus?batchId=demo-1701473848678-13029383</batchStatus>
    <message>Batch submitted for processing</message>
</response>

If there is an error, the response contains success=false and a detailed message for the error.

Default batch status response

A successful default response when the above batchStatus URL link is clicked looks like the following:

<response><batchId>demo4-1701473848678-13029383</batchId><status>complete</status><batchSize>1</batchSize></response>

Expected values for the status fields are:

Detailed batch status URL response

A more detailed response can be fetched by passing a parameter showDetails=true to the batchStatus url above.

For example:

http://mboxedge45.tt.omtrdc.net/m2/demo/profile/batchStatus?batchId=demo-1701473848678-13029383&showDetails=true

Detailed response

<response>
    <batchId>demo4-1701473848678-13029383</batchId>
    <status>complete</status>
    <batchSize>1</batchSize>
    <consumedCount>1</consumedCount>
    <successfulUpdates>1</successfulUpdates>
    <profilesNotFound>0</profilesNotFound>
    <failedUpdates>0</failedUpdates>
</response>