Speed and Improved Development Tools for Adobe Target

Today, virtually every brand is focused on doing everything it can to improve the customer experience (CX) on multiple fronts. The rapid move to the digital-first reality during the pandemic has increased the competitive pressure to improve that experience and address problem areas. That pressure will only continue as businesses direct more resources toward digital interactions, with many now viewing this as their primary channel.

Adobe is announcing new functionality that enhances the CX in a couple of ways. First, its on-device decisioning feature represents a new approach to improving the speed and responsiveness of specific components of website and app functionality. Downloading small code objects directly onto a device to deliver a specific function improves the overall app speed and significantly reduces latency.

Second, Adobe’s new hybrid decisioning architecture provides a single platform for testing and optimizing different CX elements. It enables both technical and nontechnical teams to work together to roll out new functionality quickly and deliver real-time personalization.  

The Drive to Improve Speed and Cut Latency

Adobe’s on-device decisioning can deliver near-zero latency for applications or services that require high performance. It does this by creating small, function-specific code objects that are delivered within a single payload and downloaded to the device and thus cut execution time dramatically. Marketers can use the technology to provide personalized recommendations almost instantly, and developers can use it to create and test new features. All they must do is build the code object and make it available to the desired customer set. Each of these objects can be viewed as a self-contained “logic bucket” that supports one entire feature or capability. Adobe Target customers will find themselves using many different objects, each of which can improve a specific aspect of the CX. 

Loading these code objects onto the device can dramatically improve speed. For example, Adobe’s beta customers saw a 95%-99% reduction in the round-trip times for a query handled by on-device decisioning compared with a query over the network. And there is virtually no start-up penalty—the code object is typically loaded in 1-5 milliseconds.

Providing a Single, Consistent Decisioning Model

The new hybrid decisioning architecture that is available with Adobe Target enables marketers, product managers, and developers to work from a single user interface with an integrated set of capabilities. Using the hybrid decisioning architecture, developers can manage “feature flags”—a technique used to enable or disable functionality remotely after deploying code—and roll out new features on websites and web applications within minutes. At the same time, the marketing team could be rolling out or testing personalization offers or new product-recommendation approaches.

When all these constituencies are using the same tool, the brand benefits from the ability to better leverage work across groups, reduce complexity, better compare results across different actions, and improve collaboration. This feature also enables developers to work within Adobe Target, leveraging new use cases for activities that were often siloed in other third-party tools.

Ultimately, these two new capabilities provide more options for improving CX and optimizing a brand’s internal efforts.