Recently, I worked with a client who was trying to share a bunch of segments from Adobe Analytics to Audience Manager and Adobe Ad Cloud. It should've been simple given the robust integrations we already have among various Experience Cloud solutions but in this case, we found a gap. The gap was primarily in terms of the number of segments that can be shared (20 segments from Analytics to Audience Manager) and the lack of a direct integration between Analytics and Ad Cloud. So, what was the solution?
The solution was Audience Library. Adobe Audience Library is built on the same framework as Audience Manager where Visitor segments are shared seamlessly across the Experience Cloud. Audience Library provides us that ability by automatically sharing segments across Adobe Analytics, Audience Manager, Adobe Target and Adobe Ad Cloud with no known limits in how many segments can be shared (I will update this if I come to know of any).
One other thing to note is that the segment numbers you see in Audience Library will not match Adobe Analytics as Audience Library uses AAM as the backend engine. The other interesting point to keep in mind is that even though real-time audiences get updated in the Audience Library UI once per day, audience qualification will still occur in near real-time in systems like Adobe Target.
How To Get Access To It
- The first step is to get provisioned with Shared Audiences.
- Make sure you've implemented the Experience Cloud ID Service on your Website or App.
- Once provisioned, get access to the Audience Library product in the Adobe admin console.
- Click on the "People" link with the Experience Cloud product selector menu and click on Audience Library.
Quick Walkthrough of Audience Library
- The Audience Library home screen will show all audiences/segments created in Adobe Analytics, Audience Library and Audience Manager as shown below.
- Click on the "New" button to create a new audience.
- On the segment creation page, you can create a combination of Experience Cloud audiences (retroactive) and Real-time audiences which will look like this.
- For this demo, I created a Real-time segment called "Test Segment for Audience Library" which pulls data from an Analytics report suite tied to a page name.
- Finally, we check if our segment shows up in different Adobe solutions. In this case, we'll check if it shows up in Audience Manager and Target which it does.
When To Use Audience Library
- When you've run out of segments to share from Analytics to Audience Manager.
- If you want to share Analytics batch or Real-time audiences or both across the Experience Cloud (primarily Analytics to Adobe Ad Cloud or Target) automatically. Note that Audience Manager automatically send segments to Adobe Target as well.
- If segmentation requirements are based on simple conditional logic tied to Visitors for personalization, retargeting or other use cases.
Limitations of Audience Library
- Audience Library doesn't allow sequential segmentation like it's possible in Adobe Analytics.
- It doesn't let you define segment containers based on Page View and Visit like we can do in Analytics.
To summarize, Audience Library is not the ultimate solution for all segmentation requirements but it can certainly solve a lot of problems either stemming from lack of system integrations or limitations in terms of the number of segments needed to be shared. I'd encourage you to give it a try.
