Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service
In order to deliver relevant digital experiences, you need a comprehensive and accurate representation of the real-world entities that make up your customer base.
Organizations and businesses today face a large volume of disparate datasets: your individual customers are represented by a variety of different identifiers. Your customer can be linked to different web browsers (Safari, Google Chrome), hardware devices (Phones, Laptops), and other person identifiers (CRM IDs, Email accounts). This creates a disjointed view of your customer.
You can solve these challenges with Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service and its capabilities to:
- Generate an identity graph that links disparate identities together, thus giving you with a visual representation of how a customer interacts with your brand across different channels.
- Create a graph for Real-Time Customer Profile, which is then used to create a comprehensive view of the customer by merging attributes and behaviors.
- Perform validation and debugging using the various tools.
This document provides an overview of Identity Service and how you can use its functionalities within the context of Experience Platform.
Terminology terminology
Before diving into the details of Identity Service, please read the following table for a summary of the key terms:
Email
could correspond with the identity value: julien@acme.com. Similarly, a namespace of Phone
could correspond with the identity value: 555-555-1234
. For more information, read the identity namespace overview.Email
namespace.Email
= julien@acme.com” and “Phone
= 555-555-1234” means that both identities represent the same entity. This suggests that the customer who has interacted with your brand with both the email address of julien@acme.com and the phone number of 555-555-1234 is the same.Real-Time Customer Profile is a service within Adobe Experience Platform that:
- Merges profiles fragments to create a profile, based on an identity graph.
- Segments profiles so that they can then be sent to destination for activations.
A profile is a representation of a subject, an organization, or an individual. A profile is composed of four elements:
- Attributes: attributes provide information such as name, age, or gender.
- Behavior: behaviors provide information on the activities of a given profile. For example, a profile behavior can tell if a given profile was “searching for sandals” or “ordering t-shirts.”
- Identities: For a merged profile, this provides information of all the identities associated with the person. Identities can be classified into three categories: Person (CRMID, email, phone), device (IDFA, GAID), and cookie (ECID, AAID).
- Audience memberships: The groups in which the profile belongs to (loyal users, users who live in California, etc.)
What is Identity Service?
In a Business-To-Customer (B2C) context, customers interact with your business and establish a relationship with your brand. A typical customer may be active in any number of systems within your organization’s data infrastructure. Any given customer may be active within your e-commerce, loyalty, and help-desk systems. That same customer may also engage both anonymously or through authenticated means on any number of different devices.
Consider the following customer journey:
-
Julien has created an account on your e-commerce website and ordered some items in the past. Julien typically uses her personal laptop to shop and logs in to her account with each use time of use.
-
However, during one of her visits to your site, she uses a tablet to search for sandals. During this session, because she used a different device, she neither logs in nor does she place an order.
-
At this point, Julien’s activities are represented in two separate profiles:
- Her first profile is her e-commerce login ID. This profile is used when she uses a username and password combination to authenticate her session on your e-commerce site. This profile is identified by a cross-device identifier.
- Her second profile is her tablet device. This profile was created after she browses your e-commerce site anonymously using a tablet without logging in to her account. This profile is identified by a cookie identifier.
-
Later, Julien resumes her tablet session. However, this time she logs in to her account. As a result, Identity Service now relates that Julien’s tablet device activity with her e-commerce login ID.
-
Moving forward, your targeted content could reflect Julien’s full profile, purchase history, and anonymous browsing activity.
What does Identity Service do?
Identity Service provides the following operations to achieve its mission:
- Create custom namespaces to fit your organization’s needs.
- Create, update, and view identity graphs.
- Delete identities based on datasets.
- Delete identities to ensure regulatory compliance.
How Identity Service links identities
A link between two identities is established when the identity namespace and the identity values match.
A typical login event sends two identities into Experience Platform:
- The person identifier (such as a CRM ID) that represents an authenticated user.
- The browser identifier (such as an ECID) that represents the web browser.
Consider the following example:
-
You log in with your username and password combination to an e-commerce website using your laptop. This event qualifies you as an authenticated user, thus Identity Service recognizes your CRM ID.
-
Your use of a browser to access the e-commerce website is also recognized by Identity Service as an event. This event is represented in Identity Service through an ECID.
-
Behind the scenes, Identity Service processes the two events as:
CRM_ID:ABC, ECID:123
.- CRM ID: ABC is the namespace and value that represents you, as an authenticated user.
- ECID: 123 is the namespace and value that represents your web browser usage on your laptop.
-
Next, if you log in with the same credentials to the same e-commerce website, but use the web browser on your phone instead of the web browser on your laptop, then a new ECID is registered in Identity Service.
-
Behind the scenes, Identity Service processes this new event as
{CRM_ID:ABC, ECID:456}
, where CRM_ID: ABC represents your authenticated customer ID and ECID:456 represents the web browser on your mobile device.
Considering the scenarios above, Identity Service establishes a link between {CRM_ID:ABC, ECID:123}
, as well as {CRM_ID:ABC, ECID:456}
. This results in an identity graph where you “own” three identities: one for person identifier (CRM ID) and two for cookie identifiers (ECIDs).
For more information, read the the guide on how Identity Service links identities.
Identity graphs
An identity graph is a map of relationships between different identity namespaces, allowing you to visualize and better understand what customer identities are stitched together, and how. Read the tutorial on using the identity graph viewer for more information.
The following video is intended to support your understanding of identities and identity graphs.
Understanding the role of Identity Service within the Experience Platform infrastructure
Identity Service plays a vital role within Experience Platform. Some of these key integrations include the following:
- Schemas: Within a given schema, the schema fields that are marked as identity allow for identity graphs to be built.
- Datasets: When a dataset is enabled for ingestion into Real-Time Customer Profile, identity graphs are generated from the dataset, given that the dataset as at least two fields marked as identity.
- Web SDK: Web SDK sends experience events to Adobe Experience Platform, and Identity Service generates a graph when two or more identities exist in the event.
- Real-Time Customer Profile: Before attributes and events for a given profile are merged, Real-Time Customer Profile could reference the identity graph. For more information, read the guide on understanding the relationship between Identity Service and Real-Time Customer Profile.
- Destinations: Destinations can send profile information to other systems based on an identity namespace, such as hashed email.
- Segment Match: Segment Match matches two profiles across two different sandboxes that have the same identity namespace and identity value.
- Privacy Service: If the deletion request includes
identity
, then the specified namespace and identity value combination can be deleted from Identity Service using the privacy request processing feature in Privacy Service.