Adobe named a leader in Forrester Wave report for experience optimization platforms

Today, Adobe was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Experience Optimization Platforms, Q4 2020 report for its offering in this space, Adobe Target Premium. Adobe received the highest score of all participating vendors in the current offering and market presence categories, as well in the recommendations and platform experience criteria. We also received the highest score possible in the experience optimization technique innovation and supporting services criteria. The report is based on a thorough evaluation of 10 experience optimization platform providers across 22 criteria.

According to Forrester: “vendors that support easy-to-use omnichannel campaigning, provide advanced profile data management, and deliver innovative optimization techniques position themselves for success.”

What is an experience optimization platform?

According to Forrester, key criteria for an experience optimization platform are “online testing, behavioral targeting, recommendations, experience optimization technique innovation, and platform experience.”

In the report, Forrester points out that “as fragmented, rules-based experience optimization technology becomes less effective, smooth multifunctional user interfaces, support for more digital touchpoints, and the use of AI will dictate which providers lead the pack.” Forrester also notes that “improving connected experiences has become one of customer insights leaders’ most important initiatives.”

Taking it a step further, Adobe sees experience optimization as the combination of customer experience strategy and personalization. It lets our customers easily experiment across all their digital touchpoints—web, mobile, console, device, call center or any additional owned channel —to drive exceptionally personalized experiences that make customers feel valued. This requires an advanced approach to A/B testing, behavioral targeting, and recommendations, using a tool that is operating on AI-powered decisioning.

What sets Adobe apart?

In its vendor profile of Adobe, Forrester states that “Adobe remains a dominant player in the experience optimization field. Target Premium offers consistently strong experience optimization features across the board, and its cross-technique and cross-channel workflow experience when creating campaigns is a standout.” The report also finds that Adobe’s “vision for the product is to help marketers, developers and data scientists jointly deliver true omnichannel experience optimization. Recent product innovations include integrations via platform services to make it easier to use the product with other Adobe experience offerings; increased use of AI for decisioning; and improved omnichannel capabilities.” We know that this is a vision that many of our customers are already realizing.

Interestingly, many of our customers are delivering relevant, hyper-personalized experiences spanning all their critical digital touchpoints, such as recommending content and auto-personalizing timely package offers for media customers across web, mobile app and even the set-top box, with significant conversion lift and revenue at each stage of the journey. Many financial services companies, for example, are extending personalization with Adobe Target into the authenticated experience for personalized, value-added customer service—a major current focus in the financial services industry.

Adobe’s current offering and market presence

As mentioned above, Adobe Target received the highest score of all participating vendors in the current offering and market presence categories, as well the recommendations and platform experience criteria. Adobe Target also received the highest score possible in the experience optimization technique innovation and supporting services criteria.

We believe that the following reasons contribute to why we also score high with our customers:

• Online testing: We view testing as one of the foundational capabilities of Adobe Target, and something the application has been repeatedly recognized for. Adobe Target has both robust manual and automated testing techniques that allow our customers to optimize across all channels and touchpoints. The Visual Experience Composer and three-step guided workflow simplify test setup and launch. In addition, the solution’s sophisticated, but easy-to-use AI capabilities for personalization powered by Adobe Sensei allow our customers to test personalization techniques one-to-one and at scale.
• Behavioral targeting: As our product name would suggest, targeting is another foundational capability in Adobe Target. The rich profile data collected by Adobe Target lets companies target based on any number of customer attributes and real-time behaviors progressively across digital touchpoints. Because our customers can also use analytics data natively from Adobe Analytics, they can discover and target relevant experiences to even more valuable audiences and fully validate with synchronized analytics reporting.
• Recommendations: We have built our integrated product and content recommendations capabilities for the marketer and business user to fully own and operate. Our customizable spectrum of recommendations algorithms are built for setting business rules and constraints, with embedded optimization, sequencing and analytics-enhanced reporting for use cases spanning product, content, support and more.
• Platform experience: having all experience optimization capabilities integrated within a single three-step guided workflow, to be used in concert with each other for testing and one-to-one personalization activities, has allowed our customers to grow digital experience optimization practices and center of excellences spanning all their digital interactions at scale. Enterprise permissions, built-in AI, and a hybrid deployment model (client-side, server-side, and on-device) have given customers what they need to deliver experience optimization across virtually all use cases and environments.
• Experience optimization technique innovation: Ground-breaking AI innovations, such as our recent “bring your own model” capability in Auto-Target for using custom models fine-tuned to specific business goals, keeps pace with our customers’ progressive needs in our major monthly releases each year.
• Supporting services: Our Consulting services, pioneers in the experience optimization space, work closely with our customers in all capacities, from full service to strategic/business consulting to technical or creative design support.
• Market presence. We feel fortunate that many Fortune 500 companies choose Adobe Target as their experience optimization solution. We work with over 60 of the Fortune 100, many for over a decade. Our customers span almost all industries, including retail, financial services, media and entertainment, automotive, travel and hospitality, high-tech, B2B, and more.

Summing it up

In summary, we want to thank our customers, who have partnered with us for more than a decade to grow successful experience optimization programs that span across all critical digital touchpoints. It is your work with us, and your valuable feedback, that has driven us to continue to innovate and deliver industry-first, AI-powered features in this space.

At the end of the day, our goal is to empower companies to provide their audiences with the types of experiences they’ll want to have again and again. We’re excited to receive this recognition from Forrester and see it as further validation of our strategy to equip customers to become experience businesses.

Download the full report, The Forrester Wave™: Experience Optimization Platforms, Q4 2020 to learn more.