Integrate Adobe Audience Manager

15 min

This is a third-party integration and is not an Optimizely subprocessor. See Optimizely's Third-Party Add-Ons & Platform Integration Terms.

You can integrate Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) to use your target segments with Optimizely audiences for targeted experiments and personalized campaigns.

Prerequisites

A valid Adobe Audience Manager subscription.

Administrative permissions in Adobe Audience Manager.

Optimizely Web Experimentation or Optimizely Personalization account.

Configure Adobe Audience Manager

See Adobe Audience Manager's documentation for information.

Configure an Optimizely destination

AAM destinations let you share segments with integration partners like Optimizely.

Go to Audience Data > Destinations > Create Destination in Adobe Audience Manager.

📘 Note Unless otherwise indicated, you must configure the settings as written to ensure the integration works correctly. All settings are required.

Enter the Basic Information:

Name – Enter your destination name.

Description – Enter a description for your destination.

Category – Choose Custom.

Environment – Select Browser.

Type – Select Cookie.

Auto-fill Destination Mapping – Select Yes and Segment ID.

Click Next.

Enter the following Configurations:

Cookie Name – Enter aamoptsegs.

Cookie Domain – Enter the domain where you want to create the AAM cookie. For example, if you want to target experiences on all subdomains of example.com, enter example.com.

Max Size – Enter your desired maximum size for the cookie.

Expire after – Enter your desired number of days for the cookie's expiration.

Publish data to – Select the option you prefer.

Data Format – Select Single Key.

Key – Enter aam.

Key-Value Pair Delimiter – Enter , (a comma).

Serialize – Deselect the Enabled selection checkbox.

Click Save.

Map segments to the Optimizely destination

After you create your destination, you can map one or more AAM segments to use with Optimizely.

Click Segment Mappings.

Select one or more AAM segments.

Click Add Selected Segments.

Select the Optimizely Web Experimentation destination.

Click Save.

To view all segments mapped to a destination, go to Audience Data > Destinations and select your Optimizely destination. To confirm that your segments are properly mapped, ensure that the Mapping column contains values like aam=2473389 (where 2473389 is the Segment ID).

Obtain API credentials

The API credentials (Client ID and Secret Key) enable Optimizely to retrieve AAM segments and make them available in the audience builder. To obtain the credentials, contact the Adobe Client Team at [email protected].

Step 4: Map destinations to the Optimizely credentials

You must map your destination IDs to the Optimizely credentials you generated in mapping segments. The destinations you see when you use your Adobe ID to log in to AAM may not all be mapped to the Optimizely credentials. If you do not have administrative privileges in AAM, request assistance from an AAM admin on your team or from your Adobe representative to execute this mapping.

After you receive confirmation complete the following:

Verify that your destination is mapped by logging in directly to AAM. Log out of your Adobe ID account, and go to Adobe Audience Manager login. Ensure the login page prompts you for an Adobe Audience Manager username and password. You should not be prompted to use your Adobe ID.

Enter the username and password you or your admin generated in the mapping segments step.

Go to Audience Data > Destinations to view the destination IDs mapped to the Optimizely credentials. You can now log out of AAM and reuse your Adobe ID to log back into the Adobe suite.

Optimizely configuration

After configuring AAM, complete the integration configuration process through the Web Experimentation interface.

Select Adobe Audience Manager and toggle the setting to On.

Enter your AAM Client ID and Secret Key (obtained from Adobe Customer Care).

Enter an AAM User Name and Password. This is different from an Adobe ID. Even if you access the AAM interface with an Adobe ID, an AAM administrator should be able to generate a dedicated AAM User Name and Password. Optimizely uses your AAM Client ID and Secret Key combined with your User Name and Password to access the AAM API and retrieve a list of mapped segments.

📘 Note You should create a service account to use instead of your personal account. This reduces the chance of breaking the integration if you reset your personal account password.

Enter your Destination ID. To find your Destination ID, go to Manage Data > Destinations in the AAM interface. Use the destination ID created for your product group to integrate with Optimizely, and ensure it is mapped to the AAM User Name and Client ID defined above. You may need to request assistance from Adobe for this step.

Click Save.

If Optimizely displays an internal server error when attempting to save your integration settings, your credentials cannot be validated. Re-enter your credentials and try again. If you continue to see an error, submit a Support ticket through the in-product request form.

If Optimizely displays "Your Account ID appears to be invalid" when attempting to save your integration settings, it means your destination ID is not mapped to the credentials. See Map destinations to the Optimizely credentials.

Snippet placement

For best results, place the Optimizely snippet immediately after the code used to deploy Adobe Audience Manager on the page, such as the standalone Data Integration Library (DIL) or Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) header code, to ensure AAM segments are available when Optimizely activates. If AAM cannot generate the aamoptsegs cookie for a visitor before activation, the visitor qualifies for the Optimizely audience the next time the snippet activates (typically on the next page load).

Example implementation of AAM deployed with DTM.

<head>
  <script src="//assets.adobedtm.com/ADOBE\_ID/satelliteLib-ADOBE\_ID.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.optimizely.com/js/YOUR\_PROJECT\_ID.js"></script>
</head>
...

Use the integration to create an audience

Create Optimizely audiences using AAM segments as conditions.

Open the Audience Builder.

Go to Audiences > Create New Audience.

Enter a Name for the audience.

Expand Adobe Audience Manager and drag the Segment condition to the left.

Select the segment you want to target from the drop-down list.

Click Save.

You can use the audience to target experiments and personalization campaigns.

📘 Note You can target custom segments within a single audience by combining the existing segments with and, or, and not. For example, “Segment A” and not “Segment B”.

To learn more about audiences in Optimizely, see Target audiences by choosing which visitors to include.

Target based on Adobe Analytics segments

This integration makes AAM segments available for targeting in Optimizely, but you may want to target segments defined in Adobe Analytics. To do this, you must share Adobe Analytics segments with Adobe Marketing Cloud, making the segment available in AAM.

Ensure that both Adobe Analytics and AAM use the Marketing Cloud ID Service.

Select a segment in Adobe Analytics.

Select the Make this a Marketing Cloud audience checkbox.

Go to AAM and find the segment in the Analytics Segments folder under Manage Data > Segments.

Map the segment to your Optimizely destination.

📘 Note Adobe Analytics segment data is pushed to AAM every 24 hours.

See also Share Segments with the Marketing Cloud on Pedro Monjo's blog.

Integration data flow

Optimizely customer-provided data

When you enable the Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) integration for an Optimizely project, you input the following authentication credentials, which Optimizely encrypts and retains:

AAM Client ID

AAM Secret Key

AAM Username

AAM Password

Additionally, you must provide an AAM Destination ID, which Optimizely stores in plaintext.

AAM data in the Optimizely application

When you access the Audience Builder, the integration decrypts the values collected in the previous step and makes an authenticated request to the AAM REST API to retrieve a list of targetable AAM segments.

Specifically, Optimizely makes an authenticated request to the https://api.demdex.com/v1/destinations/*DESTINATION_ID*/mappings endpoint (populating DESTINATION_ID with the value you provided when enabling the integration). For each targetable segment, Optimizely receives the segment's display name and numeric ID. The Optimizely Audience Builder then renders these segments to construct Optimizely Audiences.

When an Optimizely user saves an audience with an AAM Segment condition, the audience definition contains the numeric ID of the AAM Segment condition. The Optimizely Application Datastore stores the audience definition and incorporates it into any Optimizely web clients associated with the project.

Any AAM segments returned by the AAM REST API but not used to build an Optimizely audience are discarded. They may be retrieved when an Optimizely user uses the audience builder.

AAM Data on the customer's website

When the customer's website receives the Optimizely web client and enables the AAM integration, the web client does the following on activation (typically immediately on page load):

Check for the presence of a cookie named aamoptsegs.

Parse the cookie to retrieve a list of AAM segments for which the current visitor qualifies.

Match the identified segments against Optimizely audience conditions to determine a visitor's eligibility for targeted Optimizely experiments and campaigns.

📘 Note The AAM web client retrieves the active visitor's segment membership and sets that information in the cookie named aamoptsegs as described in step 1. The Optimizely web client does not generate a network request to AAM API endpoints.