Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) and Salesforce Audience Studio (Krux): Side by Side Comparison: Part IV – Features, Usability and Vision
All good things come to an end including this blog series! In the fourth installment of this blog, we will look at these platforms from the consultant’s POV especially when it comes to evaluating them for a client in the market for a new DMP. I mentioned this a few times in the previous posts and I will repeat it here, identifying the right DMP for your business goes beyond what the DMP can offer. Your team, processes and digital maturity play equally important roles in selecting the right DMP for your business.
We will split this post into 3 parts:
- Features and Usability: While knowing that there is a lot that happens behind the scenes in a DMP, we will address how intuitive and easy it is to use each of the platforms.
- Product Vision: DMPs are not cheap and are a big investment. We will look into what the future holds for these platforms.
- Considerations: Finally, we will outline the list of “not-so-obvious” things to consider in the selection process. These considerations are beyond the product offering and in many cases are overlooked at the evaluation stage.
Features and Usability
In my opinion, the best way to address features and usability is through the platform users. The VP or executive might pay for the platform but rarely they are the ones using it. I guarantee you that they will not even get a login. It is more likely that an analyst or digital marketer will be the platform’s power user.
Data Analyst
We are all data analysts at heart and what we crave for in platforms is the ability to access data freely and do cool things with it. Unfortunately, both platforms lack in that department. Querying or running deep analysis is not something that either platform supports today and for a simple but good reason: the DMP is only a Data Hub and the analysis to be done outside of it. One advantage that Audience Manager has in this case is its Adobe Analytics integration. This integration opens up the doors for a variety of analysis tools (Segment IQ, Attribution IQ, Customer Journey…) that data analysts will die over.
If Adobe Analytics is not in your stack, you can leverage the overlap reports to understand the audience trends or run look-a-likes to understand what underlying attributes define a particular audience. In my experience, this basic analysis doesn’t yield the best insights and therefore exporting data from the DMP and loading it in a separate database for analysis could be a better option. Both platforms offer this data export capability.
Marketer
As a marketer, your goal is to turn the insights provided by the data analyst into actions. The DMP will empower you to target or suppress any audience by mapping them to a specific exchange or medium (Email, Site, App …). Both platforms allow you to map a segment to multiple destinations/partners but only Audience Manager allows you to map multiple segments to a single destination at once. You might think that this is silly but actually it is not. There will be many instances where you will create many segments at a time, and you need to map them all to the same destination. In Audience Studio, each segment will need to be individually mapped to the destination while in Audience Manager, you can select the destination and then select all the segments that need to be mapped and execute.
Along the same lines of activation, the ability to split audiences for testing is key. Both platforms support mutual splits but only Audience Manager allows you to measure the results of an A/B test based on this split. This is done by selecting a conversion event that will be used to evaluate how each audience performs in each of the destinations they are mapped to.
General Remarks
When it comes to usability, both platforms can use a facelift and more intuitive navigation.
Menu
Audience Studio has four top level menus (Segments, Insights, Activation and Manage). Aside from being a mix of three attributes and one action, the sub-menu items are not intuitively arranged. For instance, I would expect adding/managing a new partner to be under Manage but instead it is under Activation. Performance reports are under Activation instead of Insights.
Audience Manager follows the experience cloud navigation and has clear top-level menu items which are slightly more intuitive.
Accessibility
As mentioned in a previous blog post, Audience Manager allows you to structure your traits and segments in folders. This is a great feature to manage thousands of traits and segments but the issue we tend to run into is the non-responsive design of the UI. If you have 3+ folder structure, chances are that you will quickly run out of space in the dedicated real estate and have to scroll up, down, left and right to get to the folder of interest. This can get messy really quickly.
Product Vision
Both platforms have roadmaps to enhance the DMP features and usability and few are worth discussing here.
CDP Wave
It is safe to say that both platforms got the memo that DMPs are not the coolest kids on the block and it is time to evolve into the CDP world. They both announced aggressive plans for CDPs in 2019 and are racing to launch early 2020. Now, we are not here to debate whether a DMP is better than a CDP or whether you should invest in a CDP if you already have a DMP. What is important is how CDP friendly these DMPs will be. At the end of the day, the CDP will still need to rely on a DMP to connect to a programmatic advertising network. So far, Adobe seems to be ahead with the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) which will encompass many powerful features including a real-time CDP. Salesforce on the other hand has a very compelling CDP story between its sales, commerce and marketing cloud. Who will win this is yet to be determined.
Privacy
I always thought that Audience Studio handled privacy better than Audience Manager. It offers more tools and transparency to the process. With CCPA launching on 01.01.2020, I am sure privacy is a hot item for both platforms. It will be interesting to see what changes take place in 2020.
Considerations
I helped many of my clients in evaluating and selecting DMPs for their Marketing and Advertising Stack and in all cases, I had to make sure they are aware of the following not-so-obvious things:
Cost
You would think that cost would be the first obvious thing to consider but it is sometimes overlooked. When evaluating this, consider these questions:
It is important that these are clear from the beginning so that you don’t face any unforeseen charges at the end of the year.
Flexibility
This ties into your use cases and your existing technology infrastructure. DMPs in general are not very flexible which means that your team will need to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Set the right expectations early on to make sure that this will not be a bottle neck down the road. For example, exposing customer id on the site and in app, data onboarding or data exports.
Identity
Identity management is not something that every enterprise envisions to manage within the DMP but some DMPs such as Audience Manager have this feature. It is powerful but could also be something that your organization might never use. Make sure you evaluate whether this is something you want to have and pay for. Audience Studio offers identity in a reporting aspect to show you how many devices and people qualify for a segment while Audience Manager allows you to merge and separate device and authenticated level data.
In conclusion, there is no easy way to pick a DMP but there are many ways to compare them. I hope through this series you got to learn few things that will help you in using your existing DMP or selecting a new one.
