September 2, 2025

Adobe Target in Single-Page Applications: Real-World Challenges and Solutions

Many of the websites you use every day, for example Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter, can feel so seamless, fast and smooth. You click, and content just appears, without the whole page blinking and reloading. That's the magic of a Single Page Application (SPA)! These web experiences are designed for speed and fluidity, but they introduce unique challenges when it comes to personalization tools like Adobe Target.

In this post, Santosh Kumar, Principal Consultant at Accrease, shares two real-world challenges that we faced when implementing Target in an SPA, and how our team developed scalable solutions.

What's an SPA?

Imagine a website that's not a series of separate pages, but rather a single, smart canvas. When a user first visits, the browser loads the essential HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. After that, interactions update only the parts of the page that change, without reloading the full page.

Why are SPAs so popular and powerful today?

Faster performance: Because only small chunks of data are exchanged and rendered, SPAs feel incredibly quick and responsive. This results in a significantly faster user experience.

Smooth navigation: The absence of full-page reloads eliminates the jarring "white flash" and makes the navigation feel continuous and fluid, almost like using a native mobile application.

Enhanced Efficiency: With less data being transferred between the server and the client, SPAs reduce server load and bandwidth consumption, leading to more efficient performance overall.

Modern Development: Developers leverage powerful, cutting-edge JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js to build SPAs, making the development process more organized and the applications more robust.

For the user, this means a fluid, modern web experience. But for personalization platforms like Adobe Target, it breaks the traditional pattern of reloading and re-evaluating content at each navigation.

The challenge with Adobe Target and SPAs

Adobe Target is a leading personalization and A/B testing tool that empowers businesses to deliver tailored content and experiences to their website visitors. It's all about showing the right message to the right person at the right time.

However, SPAs present a unique challenge for traditional personalization tools. Normally, when a user navigates to a new page, a "hard reload" occurs, and Adobe Target's main script (alloy.js, used for Adobe Web SDK) is re-executed, triggering a new "mbox call" to check for personalized content. In an SPA, this only happens on the very first page load. After that, all subsequent navigations are "soft reloads", dynamic content updates without a full page refresh. This means Target doesn't automatically get the signal it needs to re-evaluate and deliver new personalized experiences.

To address this, Adobe Target uses a concept called "views." A view is simply a named state or screen within your SPA. Think of it like a virtual page, even though the browser isn't actually reloading. For example, "homepage," "product-details," "shopping-cart," or "checkout" could all be defined as distinct views. When a user transitions to a new view, we manually tell Adobe Target, "Hey, the user is now on the 'product-details' view!" This manual trigger allows Target to deliver the appropriate personalized content for that specific screen, even without a full page reload.

Illustrating the "View" concept:

Picture from: Adobe Experience League.

Solving real-world scenarios with Adobe Target in SPAs

While the "views" concept is foundational, we encountered a couple of significant real-world challenges when trying to implement Adobe Target for more complex personalization scenarios in an SPA environment.

Challenge #1: Personalizing across thousands of similar pages (The "Marketer's Nightmare")

Take a large hotel booking site. It might have thousands of unique hotel detail pages, each representing a different property. In an SPA, each of these pages would typically have its own unique "view" name (e.g., "hotel-london-view," "hotel-paris-view," "hotel-tokyo-view"). Now, imagine a marketing team wants to change a small, universal piece of text, perhaps a call-to-action button or a promotional banner, that appears on every single one of these thousands of hotel detail pages. If they had to set up thousands of individual personalization rules in Adobe Target, one for each unique view name, it would be an incredibly time-consuming, impractical, and unscalable "marketer's nightmare."

Our approach: The generic view name trick

To solve this, making personalization scalable, we implemented a generic view strategy. Instead of sending unique view names for each individual hotel detail page, we sent a single, generic view name (e.g., "hotel-page" or "en: hotel page") for all hotel detail pages. This simple yet effective "trick" means marketers only have to set up one personalization rule in Adobe Target for the "hotel-page" view, and it automatically applies the desired change to all thousands of hotel pages. This dramatically simplifies campaign management and deployment.

Supporting marketers with our Accrease Custom Chrome Extension

Even with a generic view name, Adobe Target’s Visual Experience Composer (VEC) can still be difficult to use in SPAs. The VEC often defaults to the most recent view triggered, which may not be the one marketers want to edit.

To solve this, we developed a custom Chrome extension! This tool is extremely helpful for marketers working with SPAs. It listens for all the "view" names triggered by alloy.js on a page and populates them into a simple dropdown list within the extension. Marketers open the extension, select the exact view they want to work with (such as "hotel-page"), click "Activate." Then that specific view becomes visible and editable in Adobe Target's VEC.

The extension also includes a custom text box, allowing marketers to manually enter and activate any view name, even if it hasn't been implemented in the tag manager yet. This is incredibly useful for planning and setting up campaigns in advance. This tool significantly reduces manual effort, improves efficiency, and accelerates campaign creation for SPA-based sites, particularly for marketers who may lack in-depth technical knowledge.

Here is a closer look at the extension:

Here's a visual representation of how our Chrome extension “Accrease SPA Helper” helps:

Behind the extension:

Building such an extension may sound straightforward, but it requires both strong front-end development skills and a deep understanding of how Adobe Target operates. As Adobe Experience Cloud experts, we combined that knowledge with modern development tools to accelerate the process. AI-assisted coding helped us move faster, but it still took multiple iterations, testing, and refinement before we reached a polished and reliable solution. The end result is what you are seeing today, a tool that makes personalization in SPAs far more accessible for marketers, delivered with both speed and quality.

Challenge 2: Inaccurate goal tracking in A/B tests goal (The conversion discrepancy)

While personalization was now scalable, we noticed another issue: conversion tracking in Target wasn’t aligning with Adobe Analytics data.

For example, in an A/B test where the goal was a visit to the thank-you page, Analytics showed far more completions than Target.

The root cause:

After a thorough investigation, we pinpointed the problem. Since our site is an SPA, most users navigate between pages using "soft reloads." During these soft reloads, the main "mbox call" (which is crucial for Adobe Target to register user actions, evaluate goals, and track conversions) was not being sent automatically. Target was only recording a goal completion if a user happened to perform a full "hard reload" on the "thank you" page. This explained the small number of conversions we were seeing in Target compared to Analytics.

The fix:

We escalated this issue to Adobe Client Care, who involved their engineering team. After several rounds of analysis and communication, they confirmed our findings and recommended a crucial adjustment to our tag manager setup, specifically, the order in which Target calls were being fired.

Before (The problematic setup):

On Hard Reload:

  1. mbox call (decisionScope = __view__)
  2. view call 1
  3. view call 2
  4. view call 3

On Soft Reload:

  1. view call 1
  2. view call 2
  3. view call 3
    (No mbox call here)

As you can see, the critical mbox call was absent on soft reloads, preventing Target from registering goal conversions.

After (The solution: Adobe's suggested Fix):

The fix involved ensuring the mbox call was always present, even on soft reloads, and crucially, fired after all view calls.

On Hard Reload:

  1. mbox call (decisionScope = __view__)
  2. view call 1
  3. view call 2
  4. view call 3

On Soft Reload:

  1. view call 1
  2. view call 2
  3. view call 3
  4. mbox call (decisionScope = __view__) ✅

By adding the mbox call at the end of soft reloads, Target is now able to evaluate goal conversions correctly, regardless of whether the user navigates via a hard or soft reload. This simple but vital change ensures accurate conversion tracking for all A/B tests.

What does this mean for marketers?

SPAs deliver the modern experiences users expect, but they also require rethinking how personalization and testing are implemented. Our work with clients has shown that:

  1. Scalability matters. Using generic view names transforms personalization from unmanageable to efficient.
  2. Ease of use is critical. Tools like the Accrease SPA Helper extension empower marketers to manage personalization without heavy technical support.
  3. Accuracy is non-negotiable. Ensuring conversions are tracked correctly builds trust in testing results and enables data-driven decisions.

At Accrease, we bridge the gap between technical implementation and marketer usability. The result is personalization that’s not only possible in SPAs, but also scalable, reliable, and effective.

SPAs are here to stay, and personalization tools must adapt. By rethinking view management and conversion tracking, our team at Accrease has helped clients work the full potential of Adobe Target in SPA environments.

If your organization is facing similar challenges, we’d be happy to share our approach and explore how to make personalization more scalable and marketer-friendly in your setup. Contact us here

Acknowledgements

About the Author
Santosh Kumar, has more than a decade of experience in Digital Marketing and the Adobe stack. He holds more Adobe certifications than is humanly possible. When no one else can fix it, you call for Santosh.

A special thanks to Kurian George for his support in investigating these challenges, co-developing solutions, and ensuring smooth implementation. His expertise was essential in making these results possible.

January 29, 2025

How to Debug the Adobe Web SDK for Analytics and Target

Do you want to learn how to pinpoint, troubleshoot, and resolve common data issues in the Adobe Web SDK?

In this 20-minute Mini Masterclass, our very own Sampsa Suoninen will walk you through how to spot errors early, resolve them efficiently, and keep your data collection on track.

Why should you watch this Masterclass?

Many organizations are embracing the Adobe Web SDK or migrating from Adobe Analytics (AA) to Customer Journey Analytics (CJA).

When data streams are disrupted, reporting and insights can suffer.

Who should attend?

Developers, analysts, and marketers who use or plan to use the Web SDK.

Teams preparing to migrate from AA to CJA, looking for a seamless data collection process.

What you will learn:

Core concepts: Understand how the Web SDK combines data collection for Analytics, Target, and other Adobe products.

Troubleshooting method: Follow a clear, step-by-step approach to prevent and fix data flow issues.

Essential tools: Learn how to use the Adobe Experience Platform Debugger to track network requests and verify setup.

Data safeguards: Discover ways to record requests and maintain integrity, even when errors occur.

Real-world scenarios: See how other teams tackled common challenges and kept their data flowing.

Who Should Attend?

Developers, analysts, and marketers who use or plan to use the Web SDK.

Teams preparing to migrate from AA to CJA, looking for a seamless data collection process.

Bonus: In the session, you will be able to download a concise PDF checklist outlining the key debugging steps for the Web SDK—your quick reference guide whenever issues arise.

Check out the on-demand mini masterclas👇

October 23, 2024

Use Adobe Target as a CDP: A step-by-step guide to unlocking personalization

If you work in digital marketing, you cannot avoid having been exposed to conversations about how a CDP fixes most, if not all, of your problems. For companies who have bought into the Adobe stack, you'll likely be looking at Adobe RTCDP. 

A CDP isn't an impulse purchase (if such a thing exists in Marketing) but is often a long process. However, this shouldn't put you in a waiting position. If you have Adobe Target, you can start your CDP journey today and harvest some low-hanging fruits. If you need to consider a CDP, then using Target can help you build a business case for why purchasing one is valid. 

Kasper

Kasper Andersen, Partner

In this article, you will learn how Adobe Target can work like a Customer Data Platform (CDP), its good and bad parts, and how it can help you move towards using a complete CDP. This guide will show easy steps to help you get started.

Can Adobe Target Work as a CDP?

Adobe Target has many features similar to those of a real CDP. This means it can be a good choice for businesses that want to use customer data to make things more personal without paying for a full CDP. However, there are some differences between Adobe Target and a real CDP. 

A traditional CDP collects data from many sources, such as websites, emails, and in-store purchases, and combines it with ID stitching to create a complete picture of each customer. Adobe Target, however, doesn't have the same advanced ID stitching and is primarily intended for testing and improving experiences. Adobe Target can collect and use customer data, but it only has some tools a real CDP has to gather data from many sources. 

Still, Adobe Target does have some CDP-like functions when used with Adobe Experience Cloud. Customer Attributes can bring in offline data like purchase history and CRM data. For example, Adobe Target can use information from a CRM to suggest products that customers might like. This can help create a consistent experience across all channels. 

Adobe Target is good at combining customer data to create groups and personalize messages, just like a CDP. However, personalization will be on a group level rather than the 1:1 personalization a CDP can deliver.

How Adobe Target Collects Data

Adobe Target has some tools that help collect and organize customer data. When a visitor visits your site, Target creates a Profile based on the cookie ID and 'stores' information in the Profile that you tell it to. 

This is done using mbox profile parameters. 

This is great for returning visitors, as you can now personalize and promote messages based on the visitor's previous behavior. 

Personalization goes wrong when the same visitor accesses the site from a new device. A new device means a new cookie and a new Target profile.

Target has a fix for that. 

If your visitors are logging in, you can pass a DeclaredID to Adobe's Visitor ID Service or through a mbox parameter named mbox3rdPartyId. 

When mbox3rdPartyId (or the Visitor ID Service) is set, it stitches the cookie IDs across devices to ensure that the Profile stays the same across devices. 

Now, it begins getting interesting as Target begins behaving like a CDP. 

One key feature available when setting the DeclaredID is using Customer Attributes. This lets Adobe Target collect data from CRM, Call centers, and other sources all in one place. For example, a business can use Adobe Target to target customers who are evaluated as having a high churn risk and use that information to show a relevant message to reduce the churn. 

Adobe Target can also collect data in real time, which helps keep customer profiles up to date. If a customer leaves items in their shopping cart, Adobe Target can offer a discount immediately to help close the sale. 

Benefits of Using Adobe Target as a CDP

- Personalized Experiences: Adobe Target allows grouping more significant segments and personalization of them based on their common attributes. 

- Real-Time Responses: Adobe Target can react to customer actions instantly. For example, if a user is looking at a specific product, Adobe Target can immediately show them more related products. 

- Works with Adobe Tools: Adobe Target works well with other tools like Adobe Analytics. This helps businesses get more information about their customers and use it to improve their marketing.

Challenges of Using Adobe Target as a CDP

Not as Powerful as a Full CDP: Adobe Target has tools different from those of a real CDP, which does not allow one to get a complete view of each customer. 

Data Silos: Adobe Target is limited to how much offline data can be onboarded. 

ID Stitching: Adobe Target has fundamental ID stitching, which cannot be compared to a real CDP. 

Step-by-Step Guide: Setting Up Adobe Target as a CDP

Overall, there are three steps you need to perform to begin to do cross-device personalization with CRM data.

  1. Pass DeclaredID to Adobe
  2. Configure Customer Attributes (import CRM or other data sources)
  3. Create an Audience off of your newly imported CRM data

Pass DeclaredID to Adobe

As mentioned, this can be done using Visitor ID Service and the mbox parameter mbox3rdPartyId. I'll only walk you through the simplest of the two, the mbox3rdPartyId approach.

Ideally, your visitor's DeclaredID is already exposed in your data layer when users log in. If not, your IT department might have to expose it for you.

I'm also assuming you're using Adobe Tags (aka. Adobe Launch) as your Tag Manager solution and already know how it works regarding libraries and publishing flows. Here goes:

1. Create a data element for the DeclaredID (if it doesn't already exist) and map it to your data layer element. For me, it looks like this:

    2. You may already have an existing rule that triggers Target on all pages. You can edit this or create a new one.

    3. In your actions of the rule, add or click on the existing Adobe Target - Add Params to All Requests.

    4. Add a new parameter mapped to the data element in step 1. Make sure the parameter name is spelled correctly. Otherwise, it won't function as expected.

    5. Publish your new changes.

    Technically, you're done now.

    By deploying the mbox3rdPartyId, you can now do cross-device personalization, as Target will now ID sti...or rather, cookie stitch visitors with a DeclaredID. Of course, the visitor must log in on both devices for Target to stitch.

    Your segmentation is still limited to behavior collected by Target, so let's move on to ensure you can segment on offline/CRM data.

    Configure Customer Attributes

    Customer Attributes allows you to import offline data and tie it to the DeclaredID. Any offline data you can map to the DeclaredID can be uploaded into Customer Attributes, and by doing so, it becomes available to create Audiences in Adobe Target.

    Data points examples:

    • - Membership level/type
    • - Membership points
    • - Next best offers
    • - Next best action
    • - Churn risk
    • - Customer Lifetime Value
    • - Lead score
    • - etc.

    Before you start, ensure you know what data you want to upload and that the data can be mapped to the DeclaredID set on your site. Once you have that, you can get started with configuring the Customer Attributes:

    1. Navigate to People

    2. Navigate to Customer Attributes in the top menu.

    3. Click +New

    4. Creating the new Customer Attribute is pretty straightforward. The most important field is the Alias ID. When taking the mbox3rdPartyId approach, you can give it any name. If you've taken the Visitor ID Service, it is important that the alias matches the alias you've set in the implementation.

    5. Upload your file with the data and confirm the schema. Ensure that the first column contains the DeclaredID.

    6. Finally, activate the Customer Attribute for Target.

    Depending on your Target license, you might be limited to activating only three columns at a time.

    More importantly, you can automate the file upload. You could do this via your Marketing Automation tool (e.g., Adobe Campaign, Marketo, or something else).

    The benefit here is that you—in most cases—already have your CRM data integrated into these solutions. So, instead of creating a new integration, you benefit from having your Marketing Automation spit out a daily, weekly, and monthly file that Customer Attributes then pick up and load to ensure your data is kept up to date.

    Create an Audience with your new onboarded data

    If you've been able to follow along this far, then it is time to be excited, as this is where the fun begins.

    When creating a new Audience, you should select Visitor Profile. Here, your Customer Attribute will be auto-populated with the data columns that you activated.

    It is simply going crazy building Audiences and using them in your activities.

    Let's recap what you've achieved so far:

    - You're setting a DeclaredID for your visitors who log in. This allows you to A/B test and personalize cross-device.

    You've enabled and activated a Customer Attribute that imports offline data, allowing you to build segments on this data — a classic use case for why to invest in a CDP.

        Recap of the benefits of using Adobe Target as a CDP

        - Works with Adobe Tools: Adobe Target works well with Adobe Analytics and other products.

        - Real-Time Personalization: It uses real-time data to give personalized content right away.

        - Prepare for a CDP: Investing in a CDP involves getting teams together. You can slowly kickstart that process and even build a business case for why an investment in a CDP makes sense for your business.

        - Eager Businesses: It's suitable for companies who wants to move NOW and cannot wait for when budget is available.

          - Keep in mind that Adobe Target is not a CDP. However, it can be a great place to start for most companies considering a CDP but are struggling to build a proper business case or if you want to take your personalization program to the next level.

          Conclusion: Is Adobe Target a Good CDP for You?

          Adobe Target is a good option if you want to start creating personalized experiences for your customers without a complete CDP. It has tools for using customer data, creating audience groups, and providing real-time customized content. Adobe Target also works well with other Adobe tools, which makes it a good choice for many businesses.

          If you are starting with personalization or already using Adobe products, Adobe Target can help you get many of the benefits of a CDP without the high cost. It's beneficial for smaller businesses that want to use customer data to improve the customer journey.

          If you want to learn more about Adobe Target as a CDP or how other Adobe tools can help you use your customer data better, contact us! We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment or share this post if you found it helpful!

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