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DocumentationExperience PlatformDestinations Guide

Activate audiences to edge personalization destinations

Last update: Wed Apr 02 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

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Overview overview

ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform uses edge segmentation together with edge destinations to enable customers to create and target audiences at high scale, in real time. This capability helps you configure same-page and next-page personalization use cases.

Examples of edge destinations are the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target and the Custom personalization connections.

NOTE
When configuring the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target connection without using a datastream ID, the use cases described in this article are not supported. Only next-session personalization use cases are supported in the absence of a datastream.
IMPORTANT
Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.

This article explains the workflow required to activate audiences to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform edge destinations. When used together with edge segmentation and the optional profile attributes mapping, these destinations enable same-page and next-page personalization use cases on your web and mobile properties.

For a brief overview on how to configure the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target connection for edge personalization, watch the video below.

NOTE
The Experience Platform user interface is frequently updated and may have changed since the recording of this video. For the most up-to-date information, refer to the configuration steps described in the sections below.

video poster

Transcript
Hi, this is Daniel and in this video I’m going to show you how to set up the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ target destination in Realtime Customer Data Platform so you can begin sharing both segments and profile attributes from real-time CDP to target to personalize your websites, mobile apps, and other connected devices. These are mostly administrative tasks needed to get the integration up and running. In other videos we’ll cover how to actually share and use the segments and profile attributes. The setup is easy and you’ll see it’s just a matter of checking various boxes and pressing buttons, but they’re spread over a few product features and depending on how your company manages user permissions it might require a few people at your company to complete these steps. So the features we need to configure are data streams, merge policies, and destinations. First let’s enable a data stream. To get the most functionality out of the integration you should implement the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform web and or mobile SDKs which use platform edge network and data streams to send data to target. You can still share segments to target if you’re still on an older SDK like ATJS, but the segment qualification won’t happen on the edge and will be a little slower. Of course ATJS doesn’t use data stream so if you’re still using that library you can skip this step. Okay so I’m in the platform interface but you can also do this in the data collection interface too. You need to have permissions to view and manage data streams to complete this step. Okay so first both target and experience platform need to be included as services in the data stream. Second in the experience platform service you need to check these two boxes for edge segmentation and personalization destinations. Now I’m doing this in a dev sandbox and you would need to repeat this for any other sandboxes or data streams in which you’re going to use the integration. That’s it for this step. Next let’s make a small change to a merge policy. To complete this step you need to have permissions to view and manage merge policies. In experience platform I’ll navigate to profiles in the left navigation and select the merge policies tab. A merge policy creates a view of a profile specifying which data sets are included and how to prioritize overlapping fields. You can create multiple merge policies that create different views of a single profile but only one merge policy can be selected as the default and only one can be used with edge segments. To keep things simple for your marketers I suggest just activating your default merge policy for edge which you can easily do by enabling this active on edge merge policy toggle and then clicking through the workflow to save the policy. When marketers create segments that evaluate on the edge the segment definition needs to use this active on edge merge policy. Let me just show you quickly in this segment builder. You see here under the gear icon you can see the merge policy used by this segment. So if you hear from a marketer that they’re unable to save an edge segment it’s probably because they’re using the wrong merge policy and that’s why it’s easiest to just enable the default merge policy for edge. Again another simple but important configuration. So finally I’ll set up the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target connection and a destination. For this I need permission to view and manage destinations. All you have to do is select the connect to destination button and it’s going to connect to the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target account that’s in your experience cloud organization. This checkbox will subscribe you to alert notifications if a certain threshold of profiles aren’t getting sent to target due to missing attributes or consent violations. You can subscribe to them later as well. On the next screen it’s going to ask me for a name and description as well as the data stream id. For the data stream id I’m going to select the one that I just enabled with those two check boxes. Then I’m asked for the marketing actions used by target. This is a configuration setting for every destination and it helps to automate enforcement of your organization’s data governance policies and your customers consent preferences. It’s basically asking how do you use target which might be slightly different for each one of you. I’ll check a few options and that’s it for the destination and remember you can set up additional destinations for your other data streams and sandboxes. In other videos I’ll show you how you can activate segments and profile attributes to target and use them to personalize your digital properties. So thanks for listening.

For a brief overview of how to share audiences and profile attributes to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target and custom personalization destinations, watch the video below.

video poster

Transcript
Hi, it’s Daniel. And in this video, I’m going to show you how to share segments and profile attributes from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime Customer Data Platform to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target and custom personalization destinations. Let’s start by creating a segment and experience platform. I’ll go to the Segment Builder and select Create Segment. Segments default to batch evaluation, which is the slowest method. So let’s start our segment definition by selecting Edge Evaluation. When someone visits your website or mobile app with platform web or mobile SDKs implemented, their event data is sent to the platform edge network, where their profile can be evaluated for qualification into these edge segments for same page and next page personalization. OK, so I’ve defined my segment, and I’ll save it. When saving a segment, there are a few messages you might encounter. You might see this message if you’re not using the correct merge policy. You can see the merge policy a segment uses by selecting the gear icon. And this merge policy must be set to active on edge. That’s covered in a configuration video. Segment definitions that are too complex for edge evaluation might result in an error like this. There’s a great piece of documentation that spells out all the types of segments that qualify for edge evaluation, which you might want to review if you encounter this message. I’ll close this segment and activate to my target destination. This workflow is the same for custom personalization destinations. Next is the mapping step. Here’s where you can select profile attributes to send to the destination. So this is sending actual info from the profile, like first name is Daniel, individual attributes like that. So you can select any attribute by either typing it in or selecting the icon to open a dialogue, and then you can select the field. These attributes will be sent to the destination only for people who qualify for one of the segments shared to it. So in my example, only for people who have more than 100,000 loyalty points. So what you might want to do if you want to share these attributes for as many visitors to your site as possible, create a very basic segment that almost everybody is going to qualify for, and then you’ll get the attributes. So once I’m done, I click Finish to complete my segment and profile sharing. One screen you might run into at this point is for a data governance policy violation, which looks something like this. It means your segment or profile attributes contain fields which aren’t allowed for use with this destination according to the governance defined by your privacy stewards. It’s there to help you use your company’s data appropriately, and you’ll need to work with your colleagues to figure out if there’s a path forward to share that segment to your destination. The last thing I want to share with you is how to update the destination. It’s easy enough to add or remove segments. You’ll figure that out on your own, but it’s not as obvious to add or remove attributes that you’re sharing. If you add a new segment, you’ll go to that mapping step again. But what if you want to modify the attributes without adding a new segment? So to do that, open the destination and select View Data Flow. Then under the three dots, select Activate Segment. So you’ll see your segment list, and then just click Next, and that will take you to the mapping step. And you can add or remove attributes and complete the workflow. All right, so have fun sharing segments and profile attributes to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target and your custom personalization destinations.

Use cases use-cases

Use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ personalization solutions, such as ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, or your own personalization partner platforms (for example, Optimizely, Pega), as well as proprietary systems (for example, in-house CMS) to power a deeper customer personalization experience via the Custom Personalization destination. All this while also leveraging Experience Platform Edge Network data collection & segmentation capabilities.

The use cases described below include both site personalization and targeted on-site advertising.

To enable these use cases, customers need a quick, streamlined way of retrieving both audiences and profile attribute information from Experience Platform, and sending this information to either the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target or the Custom Personalization connections in the Experience Platform UI.

Same-page personalization same-page

A user visits a page of your website. You can use the current page visit information (for example referring URL, browser language, embedded product info) to select the next action or decision (for example, personalization), using the Custom personalization connection for non-ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ platforms (for example, Pega, Optimizely or others.).

Next-page personalization next-page

A user visits Page A on your website. Based on this interaction, the user has qualified for a set of audiences. The user then clicks on a link that takes them from Page A to Page B. The audiences that the user had qualified for during the previous interaction on Page A, together with the profile updates determined by the current website visit, will be used to power the next action or decision (for example, which advertising banner to display to the visitor, or, in case of A/B testing, which version of the page to display).

Next-session personalization next-session

A user visits several pages on your website. Based on these interactions, the user has qualified for a set of audiences. The user then terminates the current browsing session.

The following day, the user returns to the same customer website. The audiences they had qualified for during the previous interaction with all the visited website pages, together with the profile updates determined by the current website visit, will be used to select the next action / decision (for example, which advertising banner to display to the visitor, or, in case of A/B testing, which version of the page to display).

Personalize a home page banner home-page-banner

A home rental and sales company wants to personalize their home page with a banner, based on audience qualifications in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform. The company can select what audiences should get a personalized experience and send those audiences to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target as targeting criteria for their Target offer.

Prerequisites prerequisites

Configure a datastream in the Data Collection UI configure-datastream

The first step in setting up your personalization destination is to configure a datastream for the Experience Platform Web SDK. This is done in the Data Collection UI.

When configuring the datastream, under ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform make sure that both Edge Segmentation and Personalization Destinations are selected.

TIP
Starting with the April 2024 release, you are not required to select the Edge Segmentation checkbox when configuring the connection to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target. In this case, next-session personalization is the only available personalization use case.

Datastream configuration with Edge Segmentation and Personalization Destinations highlighted!

For more details on how to set up a datastream, follow the instructions described in the Experience Platform Web SDK documentation.

Create an Active-On-Edge merge policy create-merge-policy

After you have created your destination connection, you must create an Active-On-Edge merge policy. The Active-On-Edge merge policy ensures that audiences are constantly evaluated on the edge and are available for real-time and next-page personalization use case.

IMPORTANT
Currently, edge destinations only support the activation of audiences that use the Active-on-Edge Merge Policy set as default. If you map audiences which use a different merge policy to edge destinations, those audiences will not be evaluated.

Follow the instructions on creating a merge policy, and make sure to enable the Active-On-Edge Merge Policy toggle.

Create a new audience in Experience Platform create-audience

After you have created the Active-On-Edge merge policy, you must create a new audience in Experience Platform.

Follow the audience builder guide to create your new audience, and make sure to assign it the Active-On-Edge merge policy that you created in the previous step.

Create a destination connection connect-destination

After you have configured your datastream, you can start configuring your personalization destination.

Follow the destination connection creation tutorial for detailed instructions on how to create a new destination connection.

Depending on the destination that you are configuring, refer to the following articles for destination-specific prerequisites and related information:

Select your destination select-destination

After you completed the prerequisites, you can now select the edge personalization destination to use for same-page and next-page personalization.

  1. Go to Connections > Destinations, and select the Catalog tab.

    Destination Catalog tab highlighted in the Experience Platform UI.

  2. Select Activate audiences on the card corresponding to the personalization destination where you want to activate your audiences, as shown in the image below.

    Activate audience control highlighted on a destination card in the catalog.

  3. Select the destination connection that you want to use to activate your audiences, then select Next.

    Select destination step in the activation workflow.

  4. Move to the next section to select your audiences.

Select your audiences select-audiences

Use the check boxes to the left of the audience names to select the audiences that you want to activate to the destination, then select Next.

To select the audiences that you want to activate to the destination, use the check boxes to the left of the audience names, then select Next.

You can select from multiple types of audiences, depending on their origin:

  • Segmentation Service: Audiences generated within Experience Platform by the Segmentation Service. See the segmentation documentation for more details.
  • Custom upload: Audiences generated outside of Experience Platform, and uploaded into Experience Platform as CSV files. To learn more about external audiences, see the documentation on importing an audience.
  • Other types of audiences, originating from other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ solutions, such as Audience Manager.

Select audiences step of the activation workflow with several audiences highlighted.

Map attributes mapping

IMPORTANT
Profile attributes may contain sensitive data. To protect this data, the Custom Personalization destination requires you to use the Edge Network Server API when configuring the destination for attribute-based personalization. All the Server API calls must be made in an authenticated context.
If you are already using Web SDK or Mobile SDK for your integration, you can retrieve attributes via the Server API by adding a server-side integration.
If you do not follow the requirements above, personalization will be based on audience membership only.

Select the attributes based on which you want to enable personalization use cases for your users. This means that if the value of an attribute changes or if an attribute is added to a profile, that profile will become a member of the audience and will be activated to the personalization destination.

Adding attributes is optional and you can still proceed to the next step and enable same-page and next-page personalization without selecting attributes. If you do not add any attributes in this step, personalization will still occur based on the audience membership and identity map qualifications for profiles.

Image showing the mapping step with an attribute selected.

Select source attributes select-source-attributes

To add source attributes, select the Add new field control on the Source field column and search or navigate to your desired XDM attribute field, as shown below.

Screen recording showing how to select a target attribute in the mapping step.

Select target attributes select-target-attributes

To add target attributes, select the Add new field control on the Target field column and type in the custom attribute name that you want to map the source attribute to.

NOTE
The selection of target attributes only applies to the Custom Personalization activation workflow, in order to support friendly-name field mapping in the destination platform.

Screen recording showing how to select an XDM attribute in the mapping step

Schedule audience export scheduling

By default, the Audience schedule page shows only the newly selected audiences that you chose in the current activation flow.

To see all the audiences being activated to your destination, use the filtering option and disable the Show new audiences only filter.

All audiences filter highlighted.

On the Audience schedule page, select each audience, then use the Start date and End date selectors to configure the time interval for sending data to your destination.

Audience schedule step of the activation workflow with start and end date highlighted.

Select Next to go to the Review page.

Review review

On the Review page, you can see a summary of your selection. Select Cancel to break up the flow, Back to modify your settings, or Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

Selection summary in the review step.

If your organization purchased ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Healthcare Shield or ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Privacy & Security Shield, select View applicable consent policies to see which consent policies are applied and how many profiles are included in the activation as a result of them. Read about consent policy evaluation for more information.

Data usage policy checks data-usage-policy-checks

In the Review step, Experience Platform also checks for any data usage policy violations. Shown below is an example where a policy is violated. You cannot complete the audience activation workflow until you have resolved the violation. For information on how to resolve policy violations, read about data usage policy violations in the data governance documentation section.

An example of a data policy violation.

Filter audiences filter-audiences

In this step you can use the available filters on the page to display only the audiences whose schedule or mapping has been updated as part of this workflow. You can also toggle which table columns you want to see.

Screen recording showing the available audience filters in the review step.

If you are satisfied with your selection and no policy violations have been detected, select Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

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