If you have a website, sooner or later it is going to be found by bots. There is no way you can prevent this from happening, so you need to be ready to deal with them. This is the first of a 2-part series on this topic.

When I wrote about siloed teams, I left a lot of ideas out. This is a follow-up post, expanding on the same topic. If you have landed on this page for the first time, I suggest you first read my previous post and then come back here.

Like all guilds, digital marketeers have their own jargon. People outside the group may find it difficult to understand what certain words mean. One such word is campaign. Different people, teams or companies in digital marketing use it in different ways, often excluding others’ meaning.

Many years ago I read a story about the resignation of Google’s lead designer. He wrote a bitter post, where he explained why he did it. I recommend that you read it before you proceed with my post. Initially, it was just an curious story for me, but now I see profound implications.

The concept of consumer journeys is becoming one of the key techniques to digital marketing. It is an innovative way of creating campaigns, which requires all teams rowing together towards a common goal. If you have not heard about them, in the few posts I will explain consumer journeys in more detail.

Today I am going to diverge from the typical, more technically-oriented posts I have written in the last few months. Most of the companies I have worked with in the last 5+ years had the same issue: different Adobe tools where used by different and disconnected teams. Although this seems like an obvious issue, I wanted to put it in writing.

The wait is over. If you have followed my last couple of posts, I have been explaining the steps before you can actually start configuring Profile Merge Rules. These steps are needed so, if you have landed on this post after a search, check them before proceeding with this one.

In my previous post, I started explaining what profile merge rules are. If you were expecting that in today’s post I documented how to configure it, I am still not there yet. I still need another building block: the declared IDs. With it, I will be in a position to show you how to proceed with profile merge rules.

One of the most difficult features to understand in Adobe Audience Manager is profile merge rules. I thought of diving directly into the configuration, but first I want to explain what problem profile merge rules is trying to solve it and how it does it. Then I can move on to the code and, finally, the configuration.

My initial goal, when I wrote about attribution, was actually to talk about the configuration option named “Override Last-Touch Channel” in the Marketing Channels reports. However, I realised I needed an introduction to make it clearer and I wrote my previous post. Now I can go into the details of this technical feature and its consequences.

During the EMEA Summit 2019, one Adobe customer asked me about one detail of the Marketing Channels configuration. The conversation we then had around this question, reminded me of the confusions some managers tend to have about attribution. Let me clarify a few things about this topic.

In a recent project I worked on, the client set a team up to analyse the site speed of the website. This resulted in some clashes between them and the Adobe team. Both sides had their own arguments and it was difficult to progress. Today I want to give you my point of view and tips of what you can do if you find yourself in the same situation.

In a client-side implementation, the JavaScript code takes care of Analytics for Target (A4T), so you do not have to do anything. However and as usual, in any server-side or hybrid implementation of Analytics and Target, A4T requires some additional care.

The last tool I showed in my Summit lab was Adobe Analytics. Initially, I was not sure whether I should write about it. However, I have come up with some ideas to share and here you have the final post on this lab.

With the Adobe Target server-side code code already step up, as I explained in part 1, we are now ready to move to the Adobe Target interface and configure it. I will show how to do it with an Experience Targeting activity, but it should work as well with an A/B test.

The next step after you have a hybrid ECID implementation is to do the same with Target. I already wrote a post on how to create a pure Adobe Target server-side implementation. Now I will explain how to create a hybrid implementation. This post will show the code and the next one, the Target configuration.

As I explained in my EMEA Summit lab, you should not use the ECID server-side if you are in a web environment. The solution I proposed was to use a hybrid approach. This means that the ECID must still be generated client-side, and then used server-side.

Last Thursday (16/05/2019) I delivered my very first lab at an Adobe Summit. I would like to thank all of you who attended. It went really well and many participants managed to do the full exercise. I have received many requests to publish the content or explain more. There is so much to explain, that I will write multiple posts in the coming weeks, to cover all aspects. Use the comments if you need more clarifications.

I will be conducting a lab at the Adobe EMEA Summit. I will show how to implement Server-side Digital Marketing on Thursday at 14:00. If you want to know more about it, please join me! If you are at Summit, but cannot attend my lab, I will be at the Adobe stand most of the time. See you there!

When, a few months time ago, I started writing the series of blog posts on Server-side digital marketing, I did not initially know what to expect. If the number of comments per post is a valid survey method, then I can now say that this series has been the most popular in my blog so far. I have even received internal requests from colleagues about this topic after reading one of these posts.