Adobe Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines

Adobe was named a leader in the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines 2018 report for its Adobe Target solution. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines evaluated vendors across 15 criteria that fall into two areas — completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Personalization programs are now a must-have for companies across industries to remain competitive, as well as deliver exceptional, relevant experiences that customers expect and crave. We believe Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines” report reflects the business-critical importance of personalization, and we’re pleased the report recognizes Adobe as a leader.

We’d like to thank our customers for partnering with us to develop groundbreaking capabilities, such as AI-powered personalization in this space. It’s your collaboration with us that enables us to continue evolving Adobe Target into a solution that supports so many successful personalization programs at scale.

What is a personalization engine?

Gartner provides a detailed definition and description of personalization engines in the report, stating that “personalization engines apply context about individual users and their circumstances to select, tailor and deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions through digital channels in support of three use cases — marketing, digital commerce and customer experience. These personalized interactions can increase conversion, marketing effectiveness and customer satisfaction, thereby improving business results.”

Delivering those exceptional, personalized customer experiences at scale is a key focus area for us here at Adobe — made possible by Adobe Target and its testing and personalization capabilities, in addition to its recommendations capabilities, which enable us to deliver relevant content and product suggestions.

Gartner’s report further explains, “Personalization engines leverage data from user profiles or tracking of anonymous user behavior — usually on the web. Those profiles are enhanced with additional first- and third-party data, such as real-time behavior, transactions, geography and, even, affinity. It is then used by a personalization engine to segment and target audiences, and trigger messaging and content in one or multiple marketing channels (marketing use case).”

We designed Adobe Target to leverage the Adobe Experience Cloud profile. This unified customer profile brings together all customer data across the enterprise, including back office data (such as CRM data in Microsoft Dynamics 365) and second-party data, and combines it with data available across Adobe Experience Cloud (including online behavior, device use, and ad exposure data) to create a complete, real-time view of customers along their journey. Data is unified through Adobe’s Experience Data Models (XDM), a common data language, and allows faster, more intelligent decisioning through Adobe Sensei. This unified customer profile supports Adobe Target users in segmenting visitors into meaningful, valuable audiences for targeting experiences. In addition, this targeting can be done both manually to audiences, and on a one-to-one level using Adobe Sensei AI-driven personalization.

According to Gartner, “This Magic Quadrant focuses only on vendors who offer personalization engines as stand-alone solutions.”

Adobe Target offers this standalone personalization solution, while also serving as the personalization engine behind other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. As the personalization engine behind Adobe Experience Cloud, the solution taps into more valuable digital behavior analytics and robust data management for the creation of highly detailed audiences. These audiences may be used in orchestrated campaigns that deliver personalized content, product recommendations, or messages across all digital channels.

Final thoughts

It’s gratifying when we sense we are achieving our goal of enabling our clients to provide their customers with extraordinary and relevant experiences — the types of experiences that not only get visitors to return, but that develop deep customer loyalty. We’re pleased to have been recognized by Gartner, and look forward to continuing to deliver world-class personalized experiences at scale with our leading clients across industries.

Read the full Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines report here.

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.