What should you know about Adobe Journey Optimiser?

Adobe Journey Optimiser (AJO) is one of Adobe’s new flagship products. Whether you are new to Adobe or a long-time user of Adobe Campaign, there is a lot that can be understood when looking at a solution’s architecture. Rest assured this will remain at a high enough level to be meaningful for a non-technical audience.

Logical architecture

The product has been developed internally in contrast to Adobe’s history of Acquisition such as Neolane (now Adobe Campaign) or Marketo. Here, we notice straight away that the product has been designed to fit within, and to leverage the broader Adobe stack. There are no functional overlaps and integration with other services are native from the inception.

Below is a simplified diagram of Adobe Journey Optimsers’s logical architecture.

We have grouped the diagram into 3 main components:

• The Data Foundation, which is a light version of AEP, Adobe’s CDP (no extra license cost)
• The Decisioning, which is a mix of workflows and Machine Learning (AI)
• The Messaging, which covers the creation and sending of messages (execution).

Data

All the heavy data work is done through AEP. Whether coming from external sources or Adobe Analytics, everything is funnelled through the Data Ingestion Stream, consolidated via the Unified Profile Service, and used to create audiences via the Segment Services (from bottom to top on the diagram).

“We have Events, Data and Segments”

We have Events, Data and Segments, and all three are viable sources from an Adobe Journey Optimiser perspective. For example, a customer visits a store and uses the brand’s application, generating a raw event. This event is streamed into AEP and could trigger a 1:1 journey in AJO. In parallel, the Last_Visit and Total_Visit flags on the customer profile are updated and could also be used by Adobe Journey Optimiser as data points. Finally, this visit might qualify the customer to be part of the “Frequent visitors” segments, which could be used in AJO within a workflow.

Additionally, there is an ability to retrieve data on demand via API. For example, pulling weather data or getting a Product Stock status to enrich a workflow, personalise, or make a decision. (Note: This particular flow isn’t illustrated in the above diagram).

Journeys

Although this is the core of Adobe Journey Optimiser, there will be nothing too surprising in the workflows, especially if you’re already familiar with Adobe Campaign. The user interface is similar and only the optimisation aspect really sets it aside, not a topic we will explore here but something we will get back to.

Messaging

The Message creation and sending looks interesting from a design perspective. Again, a service-oriented architecture leverages various elements of the Adobe stack. On the one hand we have a native integration to AEM Assets, and on the other hand, the Offer Management that has been developed for Adobe Journey Optimiser seems to be setup as a separate Service component, suggesting that there is (or will be) an ability to call it from other tools within the stack. Finally, where Campaign Management solutions were typically ESPs with workflows developed as a second thought, the Adobe Journey Optimiser has really been designed with Journeys in mind, whatever the final execution channel.

Summary

Even without delving into the specifics, it appears that the solution has been designed for scalability, ease of integration and to leverage other parts of the Adobe stack. We also know that this solution brings in substantial usability improvements, and whilst marrying all this is never an easy task, it looks like AJO is delivering on the promise. Stay tuned.

For more information about the Adobe Journey Optimiser (AJO) please click here or feel free to get in touch by filling the form below.