Big News, Major Milestones for Adobe Target: Here’s What We’re Talking about at Adobe Summit 2016

From an optimization and personalization perspective, 2016 marks a truly banner year. There are countless examples already emerging, plus a seemingly endless array of breakthroughs and innovations coming down the pike —my colleague Kevin Lindsay shared of few key priorities for the year ahead including conversion rate optimization, content personalization, and mobile app engagement in a recent post.

But, beyond all of that, this is also a milestone moment in the evolution of Adobe Target. This powerful platform continues to put optimization and personalization in the hands of everyone who needs it—think guided visual workflows, machine-learning intelligence for speedier insights, and even greater potential for your campaigns and content. And now, in the midst of Adobe Summit 2016, we’re ready to roll out even more—more momentum, more innovation and more ways to maximize your optimization and personalization efforts. Here’s what’s new:

Taking Conversion Rate Optimization to the Next Level
We’re bringing enhanced marketer control, governance, and sophistication to conversion rate optimization with three new innovations:

1. Embedded Capabilities with Sophisticated Audience Segmentation: 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.

2. Comprehensive Marketer Control: Complete marketer control through step-by-step visual UX or flexible form-based and code-editing. This ensures the richness of Adobe Target’s classic workflow (formerly known as Test&Target) paired with innovations such as support for popular single page app site experiences built with MVW frameworks—think Angular. Now that you can do everything with the new Target that you could with the old one (and then some….), it’s time to start your migration.

3. New Expansion and Governance Features: New Adobe Target features support growth, governance, and expansion of testing and personalization: 1. consolidated reporting, displaying results from all Target optimization activities regardless of where tests were created (e.g. mobile apps or from within AEM); 2. real-time alerts that keep marketers up-to-date on the status of their tests; and 3. permissions that set guardrails to limit marketers’ work to only those sites or pages for which they’re responsible. Plus, Adobe Target’s A/B testing features can now also be used within AEM for easy landing or homepage testing.

Expanding Data Science in Personalization
Automated personalization algorithms provide power and intelligence to the marketer, delivering relevant content to the individual through machine-learning while providing audience discovery to the marketer. This year, expect substantial leaps in applying data science rigor and new algorithms to personalize content, recommendations, and site experiences. How?

1. New Lifetime Value Algorithm: We’re also excited to announce a new algorithm that enhances personalization progressively across the “lifetime” of a digital journey. 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.

2. Automated Personalization in A/B/N Testing: A/B testing has long been a go-to for marketers, ensuring they’re delivering the right experiences—experiences that increase conversion or revenue—to their digital customers. With the latest iteration, Adobe Target is changing the way marketers think about A/B testing—welcome to automated A/B/N testing for site experience personalization. Rather than making manual decisions about which experience variations to show an audience, with A/B/N testing, marketers can leverage Target algorithms to automate banner, button color, navigation, and page layout testing to assemble truly personalized experiences and optimize against your business goals.

3. User-Profile Based Recommendations Algorithms: Most recommendation systems employ collaborative filtering algorithms such as “people who viewed this, bought that.” For the most part, this has proven effective in helping increase conversions and cross-sells, but we’ve got something on tap that’s even better. Target will, now, take recommendations to the next level, offering truly personalized “just for you” recommendations that leverage algorithms to build models at the user level while, at the same time, providing a contextually-sensitive approach and enabling real-time adaptation—knowing I’m in Vegas, not San Jose, for example. This new algorithm powers the personalized TV experience which we’ll be announcing in Primetime Recommendations—so lots more to come here.

Extending Mobile App Optimization and Personalization
Our flexible mobile app SDK and rich features provide marketers with increased abilities to drive massive mobile app engagement. We’re announcing three key innovations in this arena, including:

1. Full Advantage of Analytics in Mobile App Optimization: Adobe Target for Mobile Apps now takes full advantage of the enhanced segmentation and reporting available through Analytics. This means that Target can, too, tap into app metrics in Analytics and use them to target and personalize. 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.

2. Automation for A/B Testing in Apps: Another major enhancement is the ability to automatically allocate traffic exposed to experiences that are part of an A/B…N test, and as a result, shift traffic to whichever is “winning.” Given that A/B testing for apps is relatively new, and many app marketers might be new to it, this is a great way to automate decision-making and realize bigger impact even faster.

3. Personalized Recommendations in Apps: Adobe Target for Mobile Apps offers personalized recommendations for products and content, creating more opportunity for deeper engagement by suggesting relevant content, and improving in-app conversion by using personalized and contextualized recommendations to increase cross-sell effectiveness.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much to share and discuss at a very inspiring Adobe Summit 2016. Stay tuned.

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