Powering Personalization: A CMO’s Guide to Adobe Target Recommendations

Personalizing a website is no longer an advanced concept—it’s an essential part of creating a great customer experience. Customers expect relevant, tailored experiences every time they interact with your brand. And when you deliver, the results are undeniable: studies show that personalized recommendations drive 10–30% of digital revenues for leading companies (McKinsey).

Adobe Target Recommendations, powered by Adobe Sensei, helps organizations automate personalization at scale intelligent. Instead of asking your publishing or merchandising team to manually curate “what’s hot” or “what to feature,” Target continuously learns from visitor behavior and surfaces the most relevant content or products—at scale.

The Framework: How Adobe Target Recommendations Work

Adobe Target Recommendations is built on three key components:

• Entities: the items you want to recommend, such as products, blog posts, webinars, or educational resources
• Criteria: the algorithms that determine why something should be recommended
• Designs: the way recommendations are presented on your site or app

This combination allows marketers to scale personalization across web, app, and even email. Learn more about Recommendations .

1. Entities: What You Want to Recommend

   Entities form the foundation of Adobe Target Recommendations. A robust entity catalog with rich metadata ensures your recommendations are accurate and effective. Each entity (product, article, video, etc.) contains attributes like, entityId (unique identifier), entityName (e.g., "Himalayan Trekking Expedition"), category   ("Adventure", "Luxury", "Family"), imageURL (to visually showcase the entity), description (short summary).

   • In retail, entities may include SKUs, accessories, or seasonal bundles that drive cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
   • In healthcare, entities could be wellness articles, patient education videos, or appointment booking links that help guide patients through their health journey.
   • In high-tech B2B, entities often consist of customer success stories, blog articles, eBooks, or webinars that nurture prospects and accelerate the buyer journey

   The entities can be updated or imported in bulk or in real-time in Target to keep recommendations fresh and accurate.

2. The Criteria: The “Why This for That Visitor?”

   Criteria are the AI-driven algorithms that decide which entities to recommend. Adobe Sensei continuously learns from user behavior to adapt these in real time. Examples include:

   • Most Viewed: Surface the most popular content/products. Healthcare marketers can leverage Recently Viewed Items or Similar Articles to improve patient engagement with trustworthy content.
   • People Who Viewed This, Viewed That: Collaborative filtering to highlight items others engaged with. Retail CMOs can use People Who Bought This, Also Bought or Top Sellers in Catgory to increase average order value
   • Entity-Based: Show related entities (e.g., hiking backpack → trekking poles). B2B Leaders can highlight recommended for you or Similar Assets to put the right webinar, case study or product demo in front of a prospect at the right stage. 
   • Personalized Recommendations: Build an individual profile for each visitor and deliver uniquely relevant suggestions.
     
     

   Instead of your teams manually curating "related articles" or "featured products", Adobe Target delivers automated personalization at scale. This reduces operational overhead and allows marketing leaders to focus on strategy and growth—not micromanaging which story or product to show. Explore Adobe’s criteria and algorithms .

3. The Design: The "How It Looks"

   Design defines the presentation layer of recommendations on your site—whether that's a carousel, banner, or sidebar module. Adobe Target supports both prebuilt templates and custom HTML/CSS to match your brand’s look and feel..

   • Retail brands often use carousels on product detail pages or “complete the look” panels at checkout.
   • Healthcare organizations can use inline grids of related resources within patient portals.
   • B2B companies may feature related case studies or webinars in sidebars or at the end of blog posts.

   Learn how to create a Recommendations activity .

Putting It All Together: Creating a Recommendations Activity

In Adobe Target, you bring these elements together:

• Define the Activity - Choose a collection of Entities 
• Select Criteria - Apply AI-driven algorithms.
• Pick a Design - Determine how the recommendations will appear.
  
  

Final Thoughts: Why CMOs Should Care

Adobe Target Recommendations is not just about technology — it’s about outcomes . The power lies not just in its AI, but in its ability to operationalize personalization at scale:

• Drive measurable ROI - Reduce friction in product discovery and drive higher conversion rates and lifetime value. Build trust by helping your customers take the right next steps and nurture your leads with the right though leadership content accelerating your pipeline velocity. 
• Automate manual work - Free your publishing/merchandising teams from endless curation.
• Integrate seamlessly - With Initialyze exporters and our Data Collection rules AEM content flows directly into Target in realtime keeping your recommendations fresh and accurate. 
• Future-proof personalization - AI learns and adapts with every interaction.

CMOs need more than just technology—they need business outcomes. By aligning recommendations with strategic goals we go beyond setup and help demonstrate clear ROI from from personalization initiatives.