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Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation guide.
Choose your partners, build your team, and plan your implementation.
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Implement Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform smartly.
Whether you’re in a B2B or B2C space, a CDP helps you build, activate, and maintain unified customer and account profiles — and getting implementation right is crucial.
Learn how to choose the right CDP implementation partner, define a phased plan, align internal and external teams, set the right goals and KPIs, and build a center of excellence to speed time to value with Adobe Real-Time CDP.
Whether your business operates in a B2B or B2C market, a customer data platform (CDP) is a powerful tool for building, activating, and maintaining customer and account profiles. Investing in a CDP can drive long-term success by providing multiple ways to manage your customer data.
But getting implementation right is the first step. A successful CDP implementation:
- Simplifies data integration and activation, making them easier to use
- Establishes governance and management of customer data based on compliance guidelines
- Helps you accelerate personalized customer experiences with real-time updates
This implementation guide provides an overview of how to accomplish these three goals with your Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation. It covers what implementation looks like, who is involved, and the major phases. You’ll discover how you can shorten time to value (TTV) and help ensure the long-term success of your CDP investment.
Five pillars of a successful Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation.
- Choose an enterprise CDP partner.
- Align your internal and external teams.
- Set goals for CDP implementation to measure success.
- Follow a phased implementation of Adobe Real-Time CDP.
- Establish a center of excellence (CoE).
1. Choose an enterprise CDP partner.
Some CDP vendors claim to offer plug-and-play products but implementing an enterprise CDP isn’t an overnight process. It takes careful planning and a well-thought-out, phased implementation roadmap. But you don’t have to do it yourself. Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation starts with selecting an experienced partner to guide you through the process.
Adobe Professional Services is your end-to-end partner — from consultation to implementation and deployment. With thousands of successful implementations done across Adobe solutions and all industries, Adobe Professional Services has the expertise to guide you through your complete Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation process.
Explore the Adobe partner network.
Adobe also offers a robust network of specialized partners who have earned a stamp of approval for proven technical expertise, implementation proficiency, and customer success. Choose from more than 150 certified partners globally that provide services and offerings across various fields, experiences, and locations.
2. Align your internal and external teams.
With partner support in place, the next step is assembling the right team within your organization. The internal and external teams that deploy Adobe Real-Time CDP must have a deep understanding of the customer data you want to capture in a unified customer profile, where and how that data is stored, and the privacy rules and regulations that apply to it.
Here’s a look at some of the most important roles and responsibilities:
The core team
Product owner
Oversees day-to-day operations, helping you take full advantage of all the features.
Project manager
Manages large-scale implementation work for Adobe solutions — like documenting technical and business requirements and driving initiatives.
Data steward
Makes sure all activities comply with company and industry privacy regulations for personally identifiable information (PII).
IT and data engineering leaders
Apply Adobe’s standard data model to all data sources and build custom integrations between applications as needed.
Other team members
Marketers
Handle data-sharing agreements with partners and manage channels where your customers interact.
Business representatives relevant to CDP
Identify data from call centers, customer relationship management platforms, and other systems to include in customer profiles.
Legal and privacy experts
Advise on how you may and may not use customer data in various contexts and geographies.
3. Set goals for CDP implementation to measure success.
Identifying what you want to accomplish from the beginning of the implementation is essential to building your initial value requirements and assessing your ultimate success. Establishing goals and measuring success continually occur throughout each phase of the implementation process.
Here are some sample objectives, goals, and KPIs to jump start your conversations:
Sample objectives
- Drive real-time personalization across channels, built on unified customer profiles.
- Activate marketing across multiple channels by building and sharing segments.
- Reduce reliance on third-party data by optimizing the collection and activation of first-party data.
- Scale resources by analyzing large volumes of customer data with AI.
Sample KPIs driven by Adobe Real-Time CDP
- Increase the number of active customer profiles.
- Reduce the time to fulfill data governance requests.
- Reduce the time from data collection to activation.
- Increase the speed of audience creation.
- Accelerate responses to customer intent signals with workflow templates built for marketers.
- Improve the time it takes to refresh customer profiles.
- Reduce the time to sync online and offline data.
- Increase the number of customer data points.
- Increase the number of data sources used to create each profile.
- Improve customer experiences across channels.
Sample marketing KPIs mapped to Adobe Real-Time CDP KPIs
- Engagement (clicks, downloads, opt-ins)
- Cost per engagement
- Cost per user acquisition
- Customer lifetime value
- Marketing ROI for paid media
- Conversion rate
4. Follow a phased implementation of Adobe Real-Time CDP.
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Our two-phase implementation plan delivers quick, strong results by prioritizing the most critical activities. It also avoids attempting to hit too many goals too quickly, which can delay time to value.
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What is a phased implementation?
A phased implementation takes place in stages defined by milestones over time. Approaches may differ across business lines and audiences (B2B or B2C), but the implementation follows a clear sequence of events.
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The initial implementation phase lays the groundwork, emphasizing planning for both technical and business workstreams — while establishing short-term and long-term use cases for Adobe Real-Time CDP. Project kickoffs give your team the flexibility to define program goals and KPIs to guide the implementation. This phase can be used as a discovery period, allowing the team to manage the required resources and steps necessary for the program’s success.
The second phase involves two parallel workstreams that can be deployed simultaneously. The implementation workstream — centered on technology — focuses on mapping data, creating audiences, and testing performance. The readiness workstream — centered on the business — drives adoption and helps ensure long-term value.
Here’s a closer look at how these phases build on each other:
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Phase 1
Planning workstream
Goals
- Define program goals, KPIs, and scope of work.
- Determine priority use cases, data requirements to support segmentation, and activation channels aligned with business objectives.
- Create a project plan and timelines.
Example activities
1. Kickoff
- Conduct business and technical discovery.
- Provide early sandbox access.
- Create a KPI-driven approach to tracking success.
2. Define objectives
- Share predefined use cases and define new use cases based on customer insights.
- Create a business requirements document (BRD) integrated with industry best practices.
- Develop a technical solution design (TSD) document for the implementation.
- Establish objectives for performance testing and define success criteria.
Milestones
- Finalize the project plan.
- Create the BRD and TSD.
- Identify the top use cases.
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Phase 2
Workstreams take place simultaneously
Goals
Implementation workstream
- Map data sources into Adobe Real-Time CDP.
- Create audiences.
- Conduct performance and user testing on data and profiles.
Readiness workstream
- Establish a center of excellence to manage Adobe Real-Time CDP and drive adoption across the organization.
- Complete the implementation and drive adoption.
Example Activities
1. Design and implement
- Identify and assess the readiness of data sources and destination channels.
- Have data modeling and data mapping conversations.
- Provide an overview of the data usage and labeling enforcement (DULE) data governance framework.
- Build audience segments in the sandbox.
- Set up integrations with destination platforms.
- Activate segments and conduct quality assurance to ensure they appear in end destinations.
2. Go live
- Validate connections to all data sources.
- Conduct detailed reviews of customer profiles.
- Provide technical training for end users.
3. Drive value
- Develop a long-term strategy and playbook to achieve measurable outcomes.
- Build an audience activation analysis report.
- Deliver coaching sessions for deployed use cases.
- Perform a business outcomes review of value driven by the implementation.
- Deliver a summary of use cases, segments, and activation to marketers.
5. Establish a center of excellence.
A center of excellence (CoE) helps ensure marketers have the people, processes, and organizational frameworks in place to support technological investments. While you may already have a CoE for data management technology, it needs to evolve alongside the implementation of Adobe Real-Time CDP to accommodate new data types, channels, and updated privacy commitments associated with this powerful technology.
What CoEs do
At the highest level, an audience CoE for data management enables organizations to fully take advantage of their data platform investment. The audience CoE governs platform usage, develops an organizational roadmap, tracks progress, measures results, and communicates effectively throughout the organization.
Sample CoE structure and responsibilities
Core team
Stakeholder committee
Steering committee
Responsibilities
- Day-to-day platform management
- Project plan and roadmap
- Access control
- Communication, including socialization of the roadmap and coordination of use cases
- Participate in monthly readouts
- Make cross-functional decisions
- Define use cases
- Participate in monthly steering committee meetings
- Approve cross-functional decisions
- Break down roadblocks
Team members (examples)
- Product owner
- Project manager
- Marketing, analytics, advertising or agency SMEs
- Privacy
- CRM
- IT and data engineering teams at the time of implementation (data architect)
- Wider representation from media, CRM, analytics, IT, legal, and privacy
- Executive sponsors from marketing and IT
Shorten your time to value (TTV) with Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation.
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To get the most out of your Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation, remember these three takeaways:
- Prioritize use cases, capabilities, and architecture. Segmenting your implementation into multiple phases helps you avoid unnecessary delays and makes it easier to identify which capabilities and technologies you’ll need.
- Select, organize, and prepare the right data. Adobe Real-Time CDP can ingest virtually any kind of data from any source. Rather than trying to connect all your customer data right away, focus on preparing the data that’s most relevant to your priority use cases.
- Assign resources for deployment. Train your marketing and IT teams to run and support Adobe Real-Time CDP. This implementation guide can help you get started on the deployment process.
Contact Adobe Professional Services to get more information on partnering with us for a smooth Adobe Real-Time CDP implementation.
Learn more about how Adobe Real-Time CDP can help you build, maintain, and activate real-time profiles for customers and accounts — with built-in privacy.
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Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform
Adobe Real-Time CDP collects, normalizes, and unifies known and unknown individual and company data into robust customer and account profiles that automatically update in real time. Marketers use these profiles to deliver timely, relevant, and personalized experiences to any channel at scale. And with best-in-class usage governance, brands can use data more responsibly and transparently — so consumers have greater control over their information.
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Title
Implement Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform.
cardDate
2026-02-18
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This guide can help you choose a CDP implementation partner, implement in phase, build your teams, and set the right goals.
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