Adobe offers more flexibility in its digital ID tools for marketers

The ability to consistently identify online users — some of whom are anonymous, while others are logged in or otherwise identified — across channels and devices is one of digital marketers’ biggest challenges. Today, Adobe is offering some help by increasing flexibility in its digital identity toolkit.

Accurate segmentation and targeting, a key differentiator separating digital from other kinds of marketing, depends on a marketer knowing who you are in your various incarnations. Consistent digital identity means, for instance, that a hotel can show you personalized airfare plus hotel packages for San Francisco on your laptop in the evening, because you’ve searched for airfares to San Francisco on a smartphone in the morning.

Adobe has now updated its AudienceManager in its Marketing Cloud to provide what it calls “levers” so marketers can set the rules for merging a known, authenticated user across different devices — and for merging the identity of an anonymous user with an authenticated user on a single device. Normally, the platform automatically makes the matches.

Rules might include, for instance, gender, household income, visits to websites of a given type, or use of certain kinds of apps.

Director of product management Ali Bohra told VentureBeat that this ability to “provide levers and controls to determine when to merge IDs” is a differentiator from competing marketing platforms.

Across devices, this allows marketers to enlarge a user’s profile and to target that user when they move from, say, a smartphone to a laptop.

For a single device, campaigns can be conducted at the device or household level, such as when a tablet is used by a family. A marketer might want to target the dad and the son separately from the mom and the daughter, for instance, and might want to tweak the rules for determining who is using the tablet and when they receive brand messages.

The identity merging in a single device can take place even if the anonymous user and the authenticated user are seen in different sessions through different channels, on different days.

Across devices and in a single device, the marketer can also set the conditions so that, for instance, data from an anonymous user just before a log-in can be attributed to that user.