Adobe Target Audit: 12 Signs Your Personalization Program Is Underperforming

8. Your Activities Have Become a Digital Graveyard

Open your Adobe Target activity list and ask:

• How many activities are still active?
• How many expired months ago?
• How many were never analyzed?
• How many have unclear owners?
• How many have duplicate targeting rules?
• How many contain outdated offers?
• How many are no longer aligned with current campaigns?

If the answer is “quite a few,” your governance needs attention.

A large activity library makes it harder for teams to understand what is currently running and increases operational risk.

How to improve

Create a governance framework with:

Archive or deactivate obsolete activities regularly.

9. Your Team Runs Tests but Does Not Build a Learning Library

A mature experimentation program should not simply produce winners and losers.

It should produce organizational knowledge.

If your team repeatedly tests the same idea because previous results were never documented, your optimization process is leaking knowledge.

Adobe's optimization approach emphasizes an iterative cycle of analyzing results and acting on those findings.

How to improve

Create an experimentation repository containing:

• Hypothesis
• Audience
• Test design
• Result
• Statistical evidence
• Business impact
• Lessons learned
• Follow-up experiment

Over time, this becomes an internal personalization knowledge base.

10. Your Automated Personalization Models Are Struggling

For organizations using Adobe Target Premium, Automated Personalization and Auto-Target can use machine learning to determine which experiences work better for different visitors.

However, machine learning does not magically transform weak inputs into excellent personalization.

Warning signs include: