Adobe Audience Manager (retirement & replacements)
Should you wait for Adobe Audience Manager to be retired, or should you start exploring alternatives now?
Luke Kline
July 31, 2024
12 minutes
Given that Salesforce recently retired Audience Studio, you’re probably wondering if Adobe Audience Manager is being retired. While the company hasn’t made an official statement yet, the writing is definitely on the wall. The current website page for Adobe Audience Manager barely even mentions the product, and all of the marketing language is aggressively pushing all existing customers toward Adobe Real-Time CDP. The question is: Should you wait for Adobe to retire this product, or should you start exploring new solutions now?
In either case, this blog post will tell you everything you need to know, including:
- What is Adobe Audience Manager?
- How Does Adobe Audience Manager Work?
- Adobe Audience Manager Benefits
- Adobe Audience Manager Use Cases
- Adobe Audience Manager Alternatives
- Should You Buy Adobe Audience Manager?
What is Adobe Audience Manager
Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) is a data management platform (DMP) that helps you leverage behavioral data to build anonymous, cookie-based audiences, which you can upload to ad platforms and demand-side platforms (DSPs) for retargeting.
The platform helps streamline audience creation and data onboarding so you can launch campaigns more quickly and target audiences more effectively. The premise behind this platform is to help you deliver consistent and relevant experiences that are personalized based on previous engagements users have had with your brand.
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How Does Adobe Audience Manager Work?
The core problem that Adobe Audience Manager solves is enabling you to take action on anonymous user behavior so you can retarget individuals across ad networks regardless of what device they’re using. To do this, the platform offers five key capabilities:
- Data Collection: Consolidating data from various Adobe-specific sources/applications, such as using Adobe Analytics to capture on-site and mobile data.
- Identity Resolution: Combining multiple datasets and unifying cross-device identifiers to create comprehensive user profiles and device graphs
- Audience Management: Providing an interface to build and segment audience cohorts based on criteria you define
- Data Onboarding: Automating audience uploads to DSPs or ad platforms for campaign targeting.
- Data Monetization: A marketplace to securely buy and sell third-party audience data sets or engage in second-party data relationships
While the platform can support multiple data types (more on that later), Adobe Audience Manager's core focus is on managing cookie-based audiences (e.g., anonymous users who have not provided any unique identifiers.)
The platform does this by looking at various user IDs (mainly cookies and device IDs) and subsequently tying data points back to those IDs. The behavioral data of each user is then linked to these IDs so you can understand the user journey and the specific actions they’ve taken (e.g., viewed your pricing page, abandoned cart, etc.)
Adobe then ties all of your data back to a single Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), which is a unique 38-character identifier generated by Adobe that underpins all of the platform’s audience management capabilities. This UUID is key for unlocking persistent user tracking as behavior and attributes change over time, so you can target customers without actually knowing who your customer is.
Once the data is made available in the platform, you can then segment audiences based on specific traits that you define and send this data back to advertisers like Meta or Google to improve the targeting and reach of campaigns to reach anonymous users with highly relevant messages and offers based on their past interactions.
However, one important factor to keep in mind is that cookies are becoming a less and less reliable form of tracking as major browsers continue to provide opt-out options and ad blocker adoption continues to increase. To combat this, companies are increasingly turning to first-party alternatives as a more accurate means of tracking user data and activating that data directly from their own infrastructure rather than using a separate DMP platform like Adobe Audience Manager.
Adobe Audience Manager Use Cases
There are generally a few reasons to implement a DMP like Audience Manager, but it’s usually to unlock better marketing efficacy across ad networks, whether that unlocks better targeting, increasing conversions, or optimizing ad spend. Here’s a quick summary of the most common use cases for Adobe CDP:
| Use Case | Overview | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-Device Targeting | Using identity resolution to merge and unify different device IDs under one profile so you can target the same user across devices | A user logs into an e-commerce site on their laptop and later uses the mobile app to browse products. AAM links these sessions so you can deliver consistent ads and personalized content across devices. |
| Better Personalization | Delivering personalized content and experiences to specific audience segments | A travel website personalizes the homepage for returning visitors based on their viewing habits. |
| More Accurate Targeting | Enriching your audience segments with additional third-party identifiers to boost ad platform match rates | A fintech company wants to ensure that all existing customers are being suppressed from campaigns to avoid wasted ad spend. |
| Retargeting & Remarketing | Re-engaging with users who interacted with your brand but didn’t convert | A user visits Nike.com and adds a pair of shoes to their cart but never completes their purchase. AAM captures this behavior so you can retarget this user with an ad encouraging them to complete their purchase. |
| Customer Journey Orchestration | Managing and optimizing touchpoints throughout the customer journey based on interactions a user has had with your brand | An automotive company uses AAM to track a user's journey, from researching electric vehicles on their website to visiting a dealership. The company uses this data to send personalized follow-up emails and offers to drive conversion. |
| Data Monetization | Selling or purchasing audience segments for targeting purposes | A media publisher like Disney builds audiences based on viewing consumption habits and makes this data available to advertisers who want to target specific audience groups. |
| Media Spend Optimization | Optimizing ad spend toward users who are more likely to convert or spend more with your brand | A retailer wants to target high-value users and reduce spend on customers who purchase low-margin products. |
What Data Types and Identifiers Does Adobe Support?
While getting data into AAM can be somewhat challenging, especially if you’re not using Adobe Analytics to capture user-completed events or if you have additional external sources outside of the Adobe ecosystem, the platform supports the following data types:
| Data Type | Overview |
|---|---|
| First-party data | Data you own that is proprietary to your brand or company. This can include anything from user-completed events, offline data like in-store purchases, or other data points from external sources. |
| Second-party data | Data that is acquired through partnerships and specific agreements that you define with another party. Often, this involves the use of data clean rooms. |
| Third-party data | Data that is collected by or purchased through another company. In many cases, third-party data is purchased to enrich existing datasets. |
Within Adobe Audience Manager, the product supports five types of IDs for profile unification and audience segmentation. The platform looks at all of these different IDs and uses both probabilistic and deterministic identity resolution to resolve and tie user-completed events across devices back to a single profile so you can understand the user journey across devices and sessions. Adobe Audience Manager users five main types of IDs to power this profile unification:
| Identifier Type | Overview |
|---|---|
| Cookie IDs | Small text files stored in the user’s browser that contain unique IDs to help create anonymous user profiles for web tracking and logged-out personalization. |
| Device Advertising IDs | Unique identifiers assigned to hardware like laptops, mobile phones, or Smart TVs. This can include Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) or Google’s Google Advertising ID (GAID). |
| Customer IDs | Identifiers from a company’s internal system, such as a CRM or a finance system. |
| Declared IDs | Identifiers provided by the user (e.g., emails, usernames, etc.). |
| Third-Party Data IDs | Identifiers provided by third-party data providers used to enrich user profiles for more effective targeting. |
How Audience Segmentation Works in Adobe Audience Manager
The core value of Adobe Audience Manager centers around the platform’s audience segmentation abilities. The audience manager lets you organize users into related groups using signals, traits, and segments.
| Overview | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Signals | Data points collected from your web and mobile apps are expressed as key-value pairs | Products, price, type, page viewed, etc. |
| Traits | A combination of signals or filters used to build audience segments | Product=camera, brand=sony, price>1000 |
| Segments | A group of users who have a common set of characteristics or traits | Users who are interested in high-end cameras |
These three audience-building pillars are the crux of the platform and all of your audience segmentation capabilities are directly linked to the data that is available within Adobe Audience Manager. This is an important point to call out because, often, it means you’re somewhat limited in the actual audiences you can create. For most companies, the richest and most complete customer data set lives in the data warehouse, which is a key reason why so many companies are adopting Composable CDPs.
Adobe Audience Manager Alternatives
The DMP market is incredibly saturated, but here’s a quick list of the best Adobe Audience Manager alternatives and competitors.
- Hightouch is a Composable CDP that integrates directly with your existing data infrastructure. The platform stores no data while providing all of the same benefits of traditional DMPs like Adobe Audience Manager. This includes everything from audience segmentation to data onboarding and data enrichment. However, instead of having to implement and maintain a separate system, Hightouch allows you to build, activate, and enrich audiences directly from your cloud data warehouse using no-code UI and then sync those audiences directly to your ad platforms and marketing applications. Fundamentally, this means you’re not just limited to cookie-based audiences, but you can access any and all of your customer data across your organization.
- LiveRamp is a traditional DMP, but much like Adobe Audience Manager, you have to ingest your data into the platform. In many cases, this means manually importing via SFTP, which can take up to 3-5 days, and your audience-building capabilities are strictly limited to the data that your IT makes available within the platform. Additionally, onboarding your data to your ad platforms can take another 3-5 days to be processed and another 1-3 days for that audience to settle in your ad platform. However, one of the advantages of this platform is that it supports a deep catalog of advertising destinations.
- Adobe Real-Time CDP is Adobe’s newest customer data offering. This platform is meant to replace Adobe Audience Manager, giving you the ability to build more granular audiences for your use cases. However, the platform doesn’t integrate super well with external tools outside of the Adobe ecosystem and supports a very limited number of marketing applications and ad networks. The product is really only accessible to existing Adobe customers who have fully bought into the entire Adobe product suite and ecosystem.
Adobe Audience Manager FAQs
Here are some of the most common questions that people ask concerning Adobe Audience Manager.
- Is Adobe Audience Manager a DMP or a CDP? Adobe Audience Manager is not a CDP; it’s a DMP. The key difference between a CDP and a DMP is that CDPs specifically focus on first-party data, and they integrate with a much wider range of marketing tools. DMPs focus strictly on advertising use cases and only integrate with advertising tools. CDPs rely on PII data and durable identifiers unique to the user (e.g., email, name, address, etc.), and DMPs like Adobe Audience Manager rely on anonymous digital identifiers like cookies and device IDs.
- What’s the difference between Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Real-Time CDP? The biggest difference between Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Real-Time CDP is that the latter is much more flexible. Adobe Audience Manager is built to handle cookie-based audiences, whereas Adobe CDP can create more durable and actionable profiles for both known and unknown users, which you can activate across other Adobe-specific marketing applications–not just advertising channels.
- What type of audiences does Adobe Audience Manager support Adobe Audience Manager can support first-party audiences, but the platform specifically focuses on helping you build cookie-based anonymous audiences.
- Does Adobe Audience Manager integrate with Adobe Target Adobe Audience Manager can be configured to push audiences to Adobe Target.
Should You Buy Adobe Audience Manager?
Adobe Audience Manager is not a new tool; the platform was originally created by a company called Demdex, which Adobe acquired back in 2011. Today, Adobe is no longer marketing this product and instead trying to migrate all existing customers onto Adobe Real-Time CDP, the company’s newer CDP offering, which is meant to be a more flexible solution for customer data use cases, so it’s likely only a matter of time before this product is fully deprecated.
With that in mind, you really have three options:
- Migrate to Adobe Real-Time CDP
- Migrate to another DMP
- Implement a Composable CDP
Many companies are choosing to go with the third option because not only is it much more flexible, but it’s also much faster. Instead of having to onboard your data into a DMP, Composable CDPs like Highotuch enable you to activate and build audiences directly off of your warehouse and then enrich them in-flight to various marketing and advertising destinations.
How a Composable CDP Works
A large health and wellness company used Hightouch for this exact use case and reduced their data onboarding costs by 80% and reduced their data onboarding time by two weeks. If you’re interested in learning more about the Composable CDP, book a demo with one of our solution engineers today!
