In this four-part blog series, we will explore Adobe Marketo Engage (Marketo) and how it fits into the Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC), as well as options for integrating Marketo with the Adobe Experience Cloud, and what we see as some exciting use cases for integration.
What is Adobe Experience Cloud?
The Adobe Experience Cloud is Adobe’s suite of products and services to manage the customer experience, from content and workflow to automation and analytics. AEC includes Adobe Marketo Engage as well as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible), Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) and a host of other applications related to high-volume transactional emails, workflow, document and project management.
Adobe Experience Cloud also includes two fairly recent additions, Adobe Experience Platform and its Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP).
AEP is an open system that consumes Adobe- and non-Adobe data and transforms it into robust customer profiles that update in real time and can be distributed to Adobe- and non-Adobe sources, using a robust library of pre-built connections to integrate with everything from marketing and CRM platforms to cloud storage and database systems. RT-CDP, as part of AEP, collects and unifies the data from the various channels into a standard taxonomy that can be used to target audiences. The RT-CDP B2B version adds depth to these profiles by creating and linking account and opportunity profiles also and is a powerful part of integrating the full breadth and depth of Marketo’s B2B architecture into an organization’s technology stack.
Integrating Marketo with the Adobe Experience Cloud
So you want to get Marketo data to your other AEC applications or get their data to Marketo? There are two options for integration. We’ll explore them in detail in a subsequent blog post, but summarize them briefly here, as there can be some confusion on the two methods:
- The Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) Connector: shares matched AUDIENCES between Marketo and certain AEC products
- The Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Source and Destination Connections: which shares data from Marketo to Adobe and non-Adobe products and, in some cases, can share data (or at least audiences) back to Marketo
Adobe Experience Cloud Connector
The AEC Connector allows Marketo to share matched audiences to:
- Audience Manager
- Analytics (if they have Audience Manager)
- Target
- Experience Manager
- RT-CDP
- Advertising Cloud
Analytics, Audience Manager and RT-CDP can also share matched audiences back to Marketo.
What do we mean by “matched audiences”?
The AEC Connector is a first-party cookie sync only: when the cookie sync is enabled, Marketo’s Munchkin.js will attempt to capture and store Adobe ECIDs (cookies) for the connected Adobe IMS Org to match these ECIDs to the corresponding Marketo cookie. If the sync cannot match a known Marketo record with their Adobe ECID, the record will not be shared between the applications.
You cannot create new records in Marketo or the other Adobe products using this connection method – you are matching records the applications have in common. How are they “shared”? The records are placed on static lists in Marketo and synched to audiences in the other Adobe applications. Remember, no data is being shared, just audiences in common. So each static list would need to represent some sort of data attributes or collection of attributes.
In a subsequent blog post, we’ll talk through the use cases for this method and what it might look like in Marketo.
AEP Source and Destination Connections
AEP integrates with Marketo via two separate connections – a source connection that shares data from Marketo to AEP and a destination connection that can share data, in some cases, or audiences back into Marketo from AEP. These connections are continuous. Unlike the AEC Connector, the sync does not require a cookie match between the two systems. The AEP connections can match records on email address, not a cookie match, and can insert new records into Marketo and allow Marketo to share records with AEP.
Source Connection
Unlike the AEC Connector, virtually all data attributes in Marketo can be shared with AEP, with the list of attributes growing with each new release of AEP. See the list of attributes here.
Destination Connection
The destination connection to pass data from AEP to Marketo is more limited than the source connection from Marketo to AEP, as of this writing. It can create new records in Marketo, and in that case (as of the July 2022 release), it can insert those records with data from AEP written to Marketo person record fields. However, it cannot at this time update any records that are already in Marketo, and so, like the AEC Connector, it would share the audiences meeting a certain attribute or attributes with Marketo via static list.
As with the AEC connector, we’ll explore the use cases for leveraging the AEP connections into and out of Marketo in a subsequent blog post.
Integration Options Summary
|
|
AEP Connections
|
AEC Connector
|
|
|
Data and Integration
|
|
|
|
|
Shares Marketo data with other applications
|
Yes
|
No
|
AEC connector only shares matched audiences, not data and will not create new records.
|
|
Shares audiences as lists
|
Yes
|
No
|
AEP connection can create new records with data in Marketo as well as placing records on lists
|
|
Creates new records
|
Yes
|
No
|
Because the AEC connector only shares matched audiences, it cannot create a record in Marketo nor in another AEC product
|
|
Supports multiple systems
|
Yes
|
No
|
AEP can receive and share information from both Adobe and non-Adobe platforms
|
|
Complexity of integration
|
High
|
Low
|
Because Marketo can share actual data with AEP (as a source connection), more set up is needed on the AEP side to prepare data schemas, fields etc. to receive that data.)
|
|
Continuous sync
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Part 2: Use Cases for Marketo with the AEC Connector
.png)