Step 13 - Generate profile and events data
Author: Jonathan Fiur ([email protected])
This exercise will launch your demo abilities to the next level, powered by reliable, well-understood profile and event data. This guide and the accompanying videos will provide you with basic-to-intermediate level instructions on how to quickly and easily generate, modify, ingest, and validate profile and event data in your AEP sandbox. This ability to create generic and custom data that brings a level of realism and relevance to the evaluators of Adobe’s CJM solutions
Prerequisites:
System: This guide assumes you have a provisioned AEP sandbox with CDP and AJO functionality to which you have admin / power-user access. You have registered your sandbox with the demo system next and run a basic Quick Setup to build out all the basic schemas, datasets, and related pieces.
AEP Expertise: This guide assumes you have at minimum advanced beginner working knowledge of how data is organized in the platform. This means you have a basic understanding of the Experience Data Model (XDM), Schemas, and Datasets and how they support managing data in the platform.
Demo System Next has a profile generator that is designed to work with the Adobe Experience Platform, using the same base schemas and IDs. This is important because this data generator enables an SC (Solution Consultant) to quickly generate usable, AEP-compatible data for the out-of-the-box profile schemas. With this data, SCs can illustrate the Attributes, Events, and Segments that are the building blocks of the Rules and Events used to start journeys and decide eligibility in Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Key Assumptions – MUST READ
This guide assumes you have built out your AEP instance as described in "Prepare demo environment". If you have not already done the baseline setup using the “Retail - Basic v2 (Luma)”, PAUSE HERE and take the steps to complete this required setup in your demo instance. Once you have completed the basic build-out, you can proceed to generate load and activate profile data using the instructions below, along with the accompanying videos.
Generating Profiles:
To generate your AEP profile data: go to https://dsn.adobe.com/data
- Assign a Base value. You can use your Adobe LDAP and that, along with the adobetest domain, will deliver messages to your Outlook Inbox. I prefer to use what I call a client reference. It’s not the customer’s name but something that will be recognizable to me, and the customer. For example, for Adobe I used “adbe.” This client-specific reference also allows me to direct the messages to a corresponding folder using an Outlook rule. You should do what works for you.
- Enter an Alias value. Here I often use the type of data, “crm” or “web” plus the date for something that looks like “crm.29-nov-22.” Because the profiles are auto-numbered beginning with zero I prefer to add a period at the end of the alias to keep the data and record numbers distinct.
- Domain: you can use the default adobetest.com if you have also left your default LDAP (AKA Adobe username) value in the Base field
- Choose whether you want to use web- or CRM-centric data (see the information below about the difference between these two).
- Choose the Vertical option for your data (Retail supports most B2C scenarios and is the default option, FSI will add account and other finance-related info to the profile.
- Be sure to select the correct Tenant ID to ensure the data matches the schema/dataset in use.
- Choose the number of profiles you want to generate. I tend to work in batches of 50-250, depending on what the demo needs to support.
- Generate your file! The filename will be a version of this: “crm_retail_global_profiles_Nov_22.json”. Which reflects dataset_variant_script-details_date-generated.file-format. This file will land in your browser’s default download folder. We’ll look at the JSON data in the next section.
Datasets Quick Q&A
- What’s the difference between Website and CRM data: Website data will include the (Experience Cloud ID) ECID whereas CRM data will have the CRM ID populated.
- What about Retail and FSI? Retail has Purchase data, and FSI has Financial Account data.
(Note: Both are illustrated and described in more detail below.)
Tips and Tricks with Demo System Next profiles
- Modify the email address domain field to use different email accounts: When you set up your email data, you can change the domain to direct the demo emails to a specific inbox to suit your purpose. For example, using an emailsim.io account to autogenerate open and click activity that can show up in the email portion of a journey report, or using a gmail.com account to take advantage of that well-known inbox.
- Align your data to your industry use case. Retail data will support a wide variety of B2C use cases with churn and propensity scores generated that can be used for segmentation and condition criteria. Using the Web Profile dataset with the Retail variant will give you an ECID that simulates the registration outcomes. The FSI variant will include account details and scores that facilitate specific segments, rules, and conditions. These are all useful for Content Variants in messages, too.
Caveats for generated profiles:
- Geography: You will get addresses for a global dataset. There is currently no way through the data gen tool to constrain the location of your profiles to a region or country. If your customer is country-specific, you can manually edit a small number of records (I’ve found 10 or less to be very manageable) to suit your needs.
- Gender/Name agreement: The system generates random names that may typically present as male or female, and the gender it assigns to the profile may or may not align with the first name. Again, when you have a small number of records, you can fix this manually if you need to. [I try to stay away from gender in demos these days because it can be a difficult topic with customers. It is important to note that AEP can support whatever range of definitions are required.]
Important Step for Later
Make sure to copy the full email address from one of the profile records you generated. We will use this later to generate and validate events on the profile record. (This is my example: [email protected] will need one that you generated).
Ingesting Profile Data
To import, or ingest, data into AEP, we’ll move over to the Datasets view.
Make sure you are choosing the Profile Dataset for the correct channel. If you generated CRM profile data, make sure you choose the dataset named, “Demo System - Profile Dataset for CRM (Global v1.1).” Similarly for Web data, make sure you are using the dataset named, “Demo System - Profile Dataset for Website (Global v1.1).” In our example above we’re using the Profile Dataset for CRM. Here’s the step-by-step:
- Navigate to the Datasets view
- Narrow your list by searching for “profile”
- Click on the Profile Dataset.
