Philips Is Using the Right Tools To Understand and Act on Customer Data, and You Can Too

Q&A with Krishna Selvaraj on integrating AEM and Adobe Analytics

Philips recently worked with Adobe to build the backbone of its new digital marketing platform. The international electronics brand hand-picked a solution to help deliver continuous, personal experiences tailored to the context of each of its customers. Doing so required two key elements — the ability for Philips to know its audiences and then the agility to deliver what those audiences want.

To understand how companies like Philips are collecting, analyzing, and using customer data, we turned to Krishna Selvaraj, technical marketing engineer for Adobe Experience Cloud. Krishna answered several of our questions about integrating two solutions — Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with Adobe Analytics — for the basis of a digital foundation. Below, you can read some of what he had to say about how a digital foundation will help you better understand your customers and deliver the online experiences that are relevant to them.

Krishna, can you explain more about Adobe Experience Manager?

Yes, AEM gives you the ability to ensure that every customer and prospect you interact with has a relevant and genuine experience with your brand. It is a powerful content management system ( CMS) designed to help you deliver personalized experiences at scale. The solution has many capabilities to help you build and manage those experiences across multiple platforms and devices — including web, mobile, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Moreover, AEM is designed for customization and easy implementation by your marketing team. It automates workflows and helps maximize content velocity so that you can deliver the right asset to the right online user at just the right moment in their interaction with your web platforms.

How does integrating AEM with Analytics help you better measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns?

By adding AEM to Adobe Analytics, you can understand how your customers are interacting with your content. The two solutions can be integrated to ensure that you deliver relevant, timely experiences that are consistent across all platforms and devices. It’s an important step in building a unified digital foundation to help you create, manage, analyze, and optimize everything your business needs to create positive customer experiences.

Adding AEM to Analytics also gives you the power to use the information about how your customers interact with individual marketing assets to improve your content delivery strategies. For example, when a customer clicks a link, AEM sends that information to Analytics. Now, your marketing team can generate reports on user data, ranging from which assets are most popular to how long a specific user spent on a product page. The combination of AEM and Analytics is a catalyst for producing and optimizing personalized experiences across channels.

How well do AEM and Analytics integrate?

Because AEM and Analytics are part of one integrated platform, data is easily shared between the two solutions. So, for example, when a customer lands on an AEM page with an Analytics framework, visitor information — along with client data — is automatically sent to Analytics for tracking and reporting.

You can approach your integration of AEM and Analytics using a direct integration approach or by using the Dynamic Tag Management (DTM) capability.

Because everything related to your Adobe digital marketing solutions is in the cloud, directly integrating Adobe Analytics with AEM is a simple process. Once that connection is made, you’ll have the ability to track user data and to use what you learn to personalize and optimize the content you deliver.

You also can create frameworks within Analytics to customize and configure how your website data populates your data reports. AEM provides a simple, user-friendly interface for authors to track content with Analytics, without having to rework any code. This improves efficiency for your marketing team, and makes it easy for non-developers to go live with optimized content changes.

How does Dynamic Tag Management factor into the analytics picture?

Marketers often have a variety of digital marketing tools that interact with their site. Creating and managing scripts on each web page can be challenging and time-consuming. That’s where DTM comes into play. It is built into Adobe Experience Cloud solutions and enables users to quickly and easily manage tags from third-party marketing tools. This makes it easy to collect and distribute that data with AEM.

DTM is a rules-based system. It looks for user interaction and associated data. When the criteria outlined in a rule is met, the rule triggers a tool, script, or some other action. For example, in the case of a page load, you can create a rule that collects user information from the AEM page with the help of data elements. You can then map that data to an Analytics variable. The result is that each time a user loads a specific page, DTM makes API calls to Analytics and collects data related to whatever variable you want to track.

You can easily integrate AEM and Analytics with DTM by creating and configuring the page code automatically or manually. The automatic method is recommended for most users because it enables synchronization of Analytics within the Adobe Experience Cloud. With DTM, you can also customize an Analytics report suite to track users based on unique IDs or names. An easy-to-use configuration interface automates this process, and reduces the possibility for user errors.

What are the top benefits of integrating AEM and Analytics?

Integrating AEM with Analytics will give you the capacity to supercharge your content delivery strategy and then use the results to refine and improve your targeting. The result is that you’ll gain insights into what your customers are doing online and what they want. Armed with that data, you can use AEM to act on those insights to produce better customer experiences, and better conversion results.

The bottom line is that AEM combined with Analytics gives you a core digital marketing solution that will enable you to deliver personalized experiences across channels — and at scale. As Philips knows, with the right tools, you’ll improve marketing efficiency and better meet customer expectations at every touchpoint.

For information and guidance on the specifics of integrating Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics, read more in this How-To article from Krishna. With these two powerful solutions working in tandem, you’ll be well on your way to establishing a comprehensive foundation for digital marketing success.