Adobe Target Audit: 12 Signs Your Personalization Program Is Underperforming

4. Your Audiences Are Too Broad or Too Fragmented

Audience strategy is one of the most important components of personalization.

If everyone receives the same experience, you are barely personalizing.

But creating hundreds of tiny audiences can be equally problematic.

For example:

• New visitors
• Returning visitors
• Mobile users
• High-value customers
• Customers from different regions
• Product-interest segments
• Previous purchasers
• Cart abandoners

can all be useful segments. However, excessive segmentation can divide traffic until individual audiences become too small to produce meaningful insights.

How to improve

Audit your audiences for:

• Size
• Business relevance
• Overlap
• Recency
• Data quality
• Conversion performance
• Maintenance requirements

Ask whether every audience actually changes the experience or business decision.

If not, consider consolidating it.

5. Your Conversion Metrics Do Not Match the Customer Journey

Another major sign of an underperforming program is measuring an easy-to-track action instead of the actual business outcome.

For example, a personalized landing page might increase:

• Button clicks
• Product views
• Time on page

while producing no improvement in:

• Purchases
• Qualified leads
• Revenue
• Applications

Adobe recommends considering the relationship between an activity's modeling goal and the final conversion outcome. For Automated Personalization, for example, teams can use a nearer-term goal while still tracking the final conversion to understand downstream impact.

How to improve

Build a metric hierarchy:

Primary KPI → Secondary KPI → Behavioral KPI

For an ecommerce site: