Adobe has launched an ambitious new addition to its Marketing Cloud suite. Called Adobe Target, the new program adds optimization testing for web content, via a simple, user-friendly interface.
Using Target, marketers can compare users’ reactions to various web experiences, and improve desired outcomes like traffic, engagement and conversions. By exposing users within a target audience to different versions of a display ad, email promotion or website, Target gathers data about how each version performs.
While this kind of optimization isn’t new – Google was A/B testing its home page as far back as the 90s, and specialized solutions like Optimizely offer cheap ways to run such tests – Adobe Target is meant to drastically simplify the process, with a guided four-step workflow built out of dropdown menus and defaults. In a product demo for Marketing, content and conversion evangelist Gina Casagrande showed how users can select the target audience for the test, choose which experiences they want to compare, select the metrics for comparing experiences, and schedule a date and time to run the test.
Adobe Target’s Visual Experience Composer
Target then displays real-time results, and compiles a report on the test. Every step of the guided workflow is visual and intuitive – no coding, web design or computing expertise is required. Executing an optimization test is similar to setting up a Facebook fan page or working in a graphical content management system like WordPress.
Selecting target audiences for testing is a matter of choosing an audience segment or segments from a dropdown menu. Marketers can use the built-in Audience Library to select target segments, or they can create new segments based on data collected by Adobe Analytics, another program in the suite.
Adobe Target Custom Audience Library
Supported metrics include conversions, revenues, and engagement, which are broken down into sub-categories like revenue per visitor, clickthroughs and time-on-site.
Likely the most impressive feature of Adobe Target is its reporting interface, which provides a graphical representation of test results in real time. The graphs can be filtered to compare different time periods, audience segments or experiences, and they can be pinned to a group dashboard for executives or other team members to view. The interface, like the rest of the Marketing Cloud, is optimized for viewing on mobile devices, with responsive design and autoscaling.
Adobe Target Realtime Interactive Reporting
Kevin Lindsay, Adobe’s director of marketing, says that Target is primarily designed to extend optimization capabilities beyond the realm of analysts and data scientists, so that people with a direct stake in marketing and publishing can take advantage of them. “What we’re seeing is a desire among people outside that core group – people like product managers and brand managers, campaign managers and editors – who want to do some testing,” he said. “They want to get their hands on tools like this, and start targeting experiences to particular types of visitors and shoppers themselves.”
Target is designed to require little supervision from IT support staff, to give marketers as much control as possible. One Marketing Cloud has been activated with a one-line JavaScript file reference, Target works out of box, and is accessible from any mobile device or web browser.
Adobe envisions a much more collaborative digital marketing environment, where it’s easy to coordinate analytics and optimization between different teams, and compare results across campaigns and products. Most marketers have been knee-deep in analytics for years, but the results of those analytics are often siloed, and can be difficult for stakeholders and team members to fully get a handle on. Lindsay said the Cloud is a step towards “democratizing” the process of marketing.
But while the Marketing Cloud’s philosophical underpinnings are revolutionary, that’s also its greatest weakness. For Marketing Cloud to be fully effective, marketers have to be willing to embrace its entire cross-capability workflow; that requires sweeping organizational change, with all its attendant costs and headaches. And with hundreds of ad tech vendors out there, and few established standards for cross-talk, there will be inevitably be compatibility issues between the Cloud and other technologies.
Adopting the Cloud doesn’t just mean adopting the technology; it means adopting Adobe’s vision of what the future of marketing will look like – a future of marketing teams that collaborate on projects much like software engineers do, who share learnings across departments and whose strategy is tied to data at every campaign stage and touchpoint. That kind of commitment can be daunting, which may be why Marketing Cloud hasn’t seen the uptake that marketing technophiles would predict.
But if Adobe’s bet on collaborative digital marketing does pay off, there are a lot of tantalizing possibilities it could enable. For now, Target’s primary capability is comparative optimization, but Lindsay says Adobe is already laying groundwork for more sophisticated tests. By next year, Target will be able to perform automated and self-optimizing tests. Eventually, marketers will be able to use machine-learning to evolve optimal user experiences, without knowing a single line of computer code.
