Adobe Audience Manager Interview Questions

The Visitor Profile Viewer uses the AAM UUID and by default looks at the demdex cookie on the browser where you are accessing the AAM UI. You can inspect your network traffic on another browser and copy and paste the demdex ID into the UUID field in the Visitor Profile Viewer and refresh. This is useful when you want to test different user profiles with different online browsing behaviors.

Another way to see segment qualifications is to map the segment to a cookie destination and examine the “stuff” object that is part of the response to the event call for client-side implementation or the analytics call (filter on b/ss) for server-side implementation.

A customer typically uses Adobe Audience Manager as follows:

• Customers log into the Audience Manager web interface to configure rule sets using defined attributes, such as signals, traits, and segments.
• Then rules are then sent to a control database and distributed throughout the Audience Manager network via proprietary configurator software.
• When a user visits the customer’s website, Audience Manager then places code on the computer to create behind-the scenes communication and data collection with Adobe and its partners.
• Edge data centers, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), process all incoming data into segments, based on the customer-defined rules.
• These data centers collect the external data, marry the incoming data in the DCS to any prior user data stored in the PCS, process the information, add cookie values to each user, and send report data.
• Once Audience Manager processes the data, it returns it back to the customer via a distributed search index that provides real-time segment estimates to the customer.
• Audience Manager also enables customers to track partner data. Partners are third-party entities that share inbound and outbound audience data with the customer.
• As with other incoming data from the customer’s website, Audience Manager collects inbound data from the customer’s partners.
• The DCS receives all incoming external data from both partners and the end user, and the PCS in the Edge data center attempts to match the stored two weeks of historical prior trait data to incoming DCS data, thereby building a more robust web surfer profile. When required, the DCS
  pushes data to an external real-time reporting function.

Adobe Audience Manager Data flow

• Users who share a set of common attributes and qualify for related traits.
• Boolean expressions, along with recency/frequency requirements, let you create segment qualification rules.
• Create precise qualification requirements with combinations of trait and segment rules.

A segment is the aggregation of both traits and signals (e.g. audience/segment = “North American customers who have purchased soccer jerseys
from the sports page”). Customers can also combine signals, traits, and segments from customer web site interactions with other data sources as well as identify destination mappings, generate custom reports, configure digital marketing integration setup, and use a look-alike model creation
and setup.

Example:

(product=camera AND type=digital SLR) OR (price>1000)

• Combinations of one or more signals.
• Boolean expressions and comparison operators let you create trait qualification rules.
• Create precise qualification requirements with combinations of traits and trait groups.

Example: From the available signals, you could create a “High End Camera Browser” rule expressed as:

product=camera AND price>1000

Signals are the smallest data units in Audience Manager and are expressed as key-value pairs.

• The key is a constant that defines a data set (e.g., gender, color, price).
• The value is a variable related to the constant (e.g., male/female, green, 100).

Comparison operators join the key-value pair and set the relationship between them. In simple terms “A signal is a key-value pair that identifies certain web activity”.

Example:

• product=camera
• price>1000
• type=digital SLR
• page=sports
• event=form submission

The Adobe Audience Manager solution includes the following components/modules:

• Audience Manager User Interface: Enables customers to define and classify the types of data they wish to track on their website.
• Data Collection Servers (DCS): Obtain audience information from multiple sources, including customer websites, third-party data providers, customers’ partners, and other Adobe Digital Marketing Solutions. The audience data is then processed based on the signal, trace, and segment rules defined by the customer in the Audience Manager user interface.
• Profile Cache Servers (PCS): Store two-week historical activity from specific users, which can then be joined with DCS data.
• Outbound Publisher: Publishes content using server to server HTTP in real-time.

Adobe Audience Manager Architecture

When you are working with data management systems, Data security is primary concerns. For Every information flow in Audience Manager components, Adobe relies on advanced industry standard data encryption methods to help safeguard the confidential information when in motion.
The technical safeguards include:
Data security in motion:  Audience Manager supports HTTPS using 128-bit AES encryption when transmitting data over the Internet. It also includes export control functionality to provide finer-grained control over which data can be distributed externally.
Audience Manager never stores Personally Identifying Information (PII) anywhere in the Audience Manager network.

Users can access Adobe Audience Manager in one of three (3) different types of user-named licensing:
Adobe ID is for Adobe-hosted, user-managed accounts that are created, owned, and controlled by individual users.
Enterprise ID is an Adobe-hosted, enterprise-managed option for accounts that are created and controlled by IT administrators from the customer enterprise organization. While the organization owns and manages the user accounts and all associated assets, Adobe hosts the Enterprise ID and
performs authentication. Admins can revoke access to Adobe Audience Manager by taking over the account or by deleting the Enterprise ID to permanently block access to associated data.
Federated ID is an enterprise-managed account where all identity profiles—as well as all associated assets—are provided by the customer’s Single Sign-On (SSO) identity management system and are created, owned, controlled by customers’ IT infrastructure. Adobe integrates with
most any SAML2.0 compliant identity provider.
Application and service entitlement is accomplished through the Adobe Enterprise Dashboard.

All components of Adobe Audience Manager are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in the United States, EU, and Asia Pacific. Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud, making web-scale computing easier. Amazon S3 is a highly redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere.

Edge servers within the Adobe Audience Manager network are responsible for:

• Collecting new data and segmenting according to this new data as a result of real-time interaction with the digital properties (e.g. web sites, mobile apps, etc.) belonging to Audience Manager customers.
• Sending this new real-time information from all Edge regions to a central location for data consolidation and for reporting purposes
• Receiving updates from the central location as a result of the data centralization process
• Publishing aliasing information to make this data available to other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions
• Publishing data (real-time and batch) to Audience Manager partners
• Core servers manage profile information and enable the platform to perform operations on those profiles to make real-time decisions.

The Audience Manager Data Integration Library (DIL) is a self-contained code module that helps you collect data from Analytics and send that information to Audience Manager. You can set up DIL through Tag management or by direct placement within the source code of a website.

• DIL passes data to Audience Manager with a GET or POST method based on the length of the query string of the event call. This behavior is built in to GET and POST methods by default. It is not specific to Audience Manager.
• DIL makes event calls withGET when a URL contains 2048 characters or less. A GET event call includes data in the URL as query string parameters, which are passed in as key-value pairs.
• DIL makes event calls withPOST when a URL contains more than 2048 A POST event call includes data in the body of the request. DIL puts data into key-value pairs and passes information as form data rather than in the URL query string.
• Although each method passes data in a different way, this does not affect functionality. For example, with either method, Audience Manager still sends data to destinations, ID syncs works normally, and you can create traits from data signals.

The REST APIs let you work pro-grammatically with most Audience Management features and functions that are available in the user interface.

Yes, the test segments have different segment IDs. For destinations with Auto-fill Destination Mapping or segments sent to Google,Audience Lab will handle the mapping values just like the destinations normally would.