Announcing Data Explorer: Unstructured Data Collection with Adobe Audience Manager

A significant enhancement to Adobe Audience Manager was announced at Adobe
Summit in Las Vegas last month. The new feature, Data Explorer, provides a
self-service interface for Adobe Audience Manager clients to retroactively
classify and utilize incoming data signals. With this feature, incoming data —
or “unstructured data” — becomes useful, even before it is categorized within
trait taxonomy. Marketers will realize key benefits immediately, including the
following:

• Avoiding data loss: Marketers can backfill historical trait realizations, even if they didn’t define them before collection began.
• Focusing on high-value audiences: The need to create high-value audiences ahead of time (or just in case) is eliminated, allowing marketers to focus on high-value audiences.
• Improved workflow: Marketers can create traits instantly in the Audience Manager UI, which also makes recommendations based on trending signals.

Which marketing use cases will benefit most from utilizing Data Explorer?

• Manage media exposure data at scale. If your media team manages many campaigns or needs very diverse granularity among publishers, Data Explorer is a godsend. As you launch campaigns or make optimizations to new publishers, data coming in through pixels or log files will be available to be easily added by your team to your taxonomy.
• Store net new attributes on the fly. As a publisher you might have new articles launching daily, as a retailer you have new product categories regularly. Data Explorer allows you to adapt to these changes and store important attributes quickly in order to avoid data loss.
• Manage human error. While taxonomies are important, human error or “fat fingering” is a fact of life. Ease your anxiety by knowing that Data Explorer will capture all key value pairs so if any mistakes are made in the taxonomy process, you have a fail-safe ability to store that data later on.

How is Data Explorer different from existing solutions in market today?

• Self-service access: While Adobe is not the first to offer unstructured data collection in a DMP context, Adobe has broken new ground by enabling this feature to be accessed in the user interface. Customers can browse through historical data collected by the DMP and add traits to their taxonomy in real time. This eliminates the industry standard multi-day managed-service dependency, providing a big step forward over other offerings currently in market.
• Evaluate quality over quantity: Adobe DMP customers can evaluate the value of incoming data signals and make informed decisions about the value of the data based on its source and overall inbound volume. This lets marketers add only data to their account that is meaningful and useful.

Putting the focus back on delivering customer experience

DMPs are the backbone of your experience business. Data Explorer represents a big step forward for Adobe, while taking unstructured data collection to the next level for marketers. No longer is making a decision about unstructured vs. structured data collection a critical choice in the DMP selection process. With Adobe, marketers get both capabilities — flexibility of unstructured systems at the speed of structured systems.

For additional perspective, see my post on LinkedIn.

Audience Manager enhancements mentioned are expected to be available over the course of the year. Keep an eye on Adobe Experience Cloud release notes for the latest information on feature availability.