Overview: Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection and SDK

Overview

Brands must capture detailed data about each relevant customer engagement if they expect to offer industry leading customer experiences. Every web page view, mobile app session, loyalty status change, customer support interaction, product research interaction, and so on must all be tracked and recorded. Tracking must be done in real-time, with consent, and with complete control and visibility of how the data flows to downstream products. Adobe has invested heavily in Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection, a modern, scalable, industry-leading product with Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network at its core.

One incredible feature of this data collection technology is Event Forwarding. As rich customer interaction data flows through the Edge Network it can be intelligently routed to Adobe and non-Adobe applications that can take action on the customer behavior in real time. You can think of event forwarding similar to asking the brand to put a conversion tag on their "thank you" page, but the major difference is that event forwarding will pass the event data all on the server side. Event forwarding decreases web page and app weight by using the Edge Network to execute tasks normally done on the client side. Implemented in a similar manner to tags, event forwarding rules can transform and send data to new destinations. However, instead of sending this data from a client application like a web browser, the data is sent from Adobe’s servers.

For Adobe partners, the opportunity to explore is creating an Event Forwarding extension. These extensions allow brands to easily include a simple rule that forward important customer events to the Adobe partners data collection server. A brand's marketing technologist can quickly activate the extension and rule with little to no involvement from their IT team and with no changes being published to their website. Just like with Adobe Experience Platform Sources and Destinations, Adobe partners can develop and test their extension with a self-service approach and publish it to a catalog where brands can easily find and install it.

You must be an official Adobe partner at Silver, Gold, or Platinum tier to gain access to an Experience Platform sandbox. If you are interested in developing an Event Forwarding connector, please review this integration guide.