Performance and relevance - delivering Personalization in AEM Edge Delivery Services with Adobe Journey Optimizer
At the frontier of modern data-driven marketing, one concept stands out above the rest.
Personalization
Having the ability to create dynamic, digital experiences that resonate with each individual is a hugely powerful notion. You can have a lightspeed website that ticks every performance criteria box with a constant flow of content - a critical first requirement that AEM Edge Delivery Services performs flawlessly as a web content management platform.
Yet without personalization - adapting that content to the specific, timely need and interest of the user, you miss relevance - the glue that resonates with that user's specific need and interests and holds attention long enough to convert them to the next step of a customer journey which ends with a satisfied need.
Every website or mobile experience will have a variety of user types, often referred to as Personas. Each Persona may then be on different steps of a particular customer journey, having browsed before or on a first visit, indicating interest or disinterest in content or product topics, reacting to or ignoring content. Personas multiplied by Journey Steps equals an exponential number of ways a top-of-page digital experience should be organized for an individual user to immediately capture their attention with relevant content. From the first moment that page loads - and loads quickly - the content should strike a chord, grabbing attention with a bespoke experience that is more engaging than any other destination, and saves them time.
While 71% of consumers want brands to anticipate their needs with personalized offers or helpful information, only 34% of brands deliver effectively. This significant gap emphasizes the opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves through exceptional digital customer experiences. Why? Because personalization can be difficult to achieve, for many reasons, and often can slow down or complicate a digital experience to the point of user abandonment.
Adobe’s 2025 AI and Digital Trends report found that only 14% of practitioners report being able to deliver exceptional digital customer experiences that surprise and delight. Many of these are early adopters of Edge Delivery Services (Edge Delivery), a suite of services designed to accelerate content delivery and expand publishing possibilities. Yet few are utilizing the full potential of this powerful tool without a matched, well integrated personalization engine.
For this combination of high performance personalization at scale, we recommend our solution combining Edge Delivery Services with Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), leveraging server-side Edge Decision Management for blazingly fast dynamic content delivery - performance AND relevance.
Presented as a concept for the AEM Rockstar competition at Adobe Summit Las Vegas 2025, Cognizant Netcentric’s innovative Edge Delivery + AJO package solution is designed to harness the power of Edge Delivery to unlock personalization at scale. We aim to provide a simple, effective solution, leveraging Edge Delivery Services to its fullest while avoiding needless complexity.
With our Edge Delivery package, we aim to create the kind of server-side personalization within Edge Delivery’s flexible document authoring and fast performance that delivers a more consistent, streamlined omnichannel experience.
The power of 1:1 personalization
Adding personalization to Edge Delivery websites with existing Adobe tools can be a challenge. Adobe Edge Delivery Services is ideal for high performance web delivery when it comes to delivering personalized experiences. Out of the box, we have Edge Delivery Experimentation, but it’s relatively limited. Another option for brands with Edge Delivery Services-run sites is Adobe Target, which offers a high degree of functionality, but is more oriented to A/B testing and “segment” based personalization vs true 1:1, and can have performance impacts. This could have a negative effect on page load times and the overall user experience.
A better option would be a smooth integration between Edge Delivery Services document-based authoring and a true 1:1 personalization layer, creating dynamic content selection and layout of experiences based on individual, unique profiles - Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Our packaged solution combines 1:1 personalization with our existing OptiMax AEM-based content management solution (formerly known as EDS+). Together, this solution maintains the speed and efficiency of Edge Delivery Services while leveraging the powerful audience management, digital signal event collection and next-best offer decisioning capabilities of AJO, all on performance-optimized edge servers around the world for incredibly fast delivery of fully dynamic experiences.
We chose AJO as, first and foremost, it's a profile-based personalization engine. It determines which content to show to individual users based on their rich CRM profiles and collected user behaviour on and off the site. This unified customer profile engine therefore supports millions of content variations reflecting the complexity of differing behavioral and demographic factors defining Personas, with relevance based on continuously learned content interests and needs as users progress through customer journeys across multiple channels.
AJO integrates well beyond web-based Edge Delivery into cross-channel campaigns. This means that not only can you personalize the web and mobile experience, but you could also launch personalized email, offline, programmatic ad and mobile messaging based on Edge Delivery-triggered web events, completing a virtuous loop.
The central idea is to seamlessly integrate OptiMax with AJO to offer real-time web personalization, at scale and reducing time-to-market.
Importantly, the approach makes full use of AJO’s advanced content decisioning features and customer profiles in the background. This maintains a lean implementation, focusing on Edge Delivery Services for efficient and accelerated content delivery, and AJO for robust journey orchestration.
Case study: homepage personalization with Edge Delivery Services and Adobe Journey Optimizer
Let’s say we wanted to personalize three elements of a homepage to move beyond a generic content experience to a true 1:1 personalized experience to measurably increase the impact and engagement time of a site. Here’s how we did it:
- First we’d take tiled content based purely on latest content, and replace that generic Block with an AJO web channel that can deliver content tiles directly related to that specific user.
- The second technique is to personalize the header and navigation so it feels like a logged-in, authenticated experience, with menu options and customer-specific attributes unique to the users needs, also provided by AJO code-based experiences.
- The third idea is to replace a generic hero bar component block with an AJO Content Card block that marketing teams can use to deliver high-priority messages to targeted audiences very simply.
This is accomplished simply by adding three Edge Delivery Services additional blocks in our Edge Delivery document for our home page (based on a Google Doc) – a table with two rows. Each block is given a unique placement name, and the value of an AJO web channel. Repeat this three times and we've got three different types of personalizations.
Now, in AJO, we can configure channels that reflect the placeholders that we created in Edge, as well as the related AJO Campaigns that define the content decisions and the content itself as AJO Offers.
Edge Delivery provides the base page content at rapid speed; AJO provides the payload of personalization also using edge delivery of the personalization, in our case, as JSON payloads.
For this solution, we use a serverless function, also operating on local edge servers, to bring together the Edge Delivery page with placeholders with the JSON personalization from AJO. We like to use Cloudflare, but other services can also be used, such as AMS Lambda or Azure Functions. From here, all website traffic flows via Cloudflare Worker, which orchestrates the personalized content build, calling AJO to fetch personalized content based on first-party IDs - not third-party cookies — making it a privacy-optimized, fully cookieless solution. It then merges the two and returns the final, fully personalized page to the browser — all in milliseconds.
Client-side or Server-side personalization?
While client-side, browser-based personalization using cookies may be standard, and AJO indeed can also be integrated this way, we find some downsides, particularly with our highly regulated customers such as banking or pharma companies. Server-side personalization ensures seamlessness and consistency across all digital platforms, removing the need to rely on the user’s device or browser, and limiting the number of individual http requests. It’s also beneficial in scenarios where client-side implementations of additional script libraries or front end changes can be limited due to factors such as disparate development timelines or restrictions on third-party cookies and cross-domain tracking.
True personalization for your target audiences
This solution, designed as an “AJO add-on” for OptiMax, stands to benefit Edge Delivery clients seeking true 1:1 personalization at scale, whether through traditional client-side methods or a pure server-side implementation. It also aims to appeal to clients impressed by the rapid implementation of Edge Delivery who are looking to integrate sophisticated web personalization, potentially extending to simple journeys and outbound channels like email and SMS.
Enhanced customer experiences with optimal performance and trust
In today's digital-first landscape, Edge Delivery Services stands out as a solution that not only boosts site performance and accelerates time-to-market but also offers the potential for consistent, high-quality personalized customer experiences at scale.
By streamlining content workflows through innovations like document-based authoring, Edge Delivery enables teams to focus more on content quality and the creation of customized experiences for different target audiences. And with a host of state-of-the-art solutions, businesses can stay agile as demand for content increases, driving conversions and business impact while reducing costs.
Designed to be a key component of a comprehensive content supply chain, Edge Delivery integrates seamlessly with other crucial tools like Adobe Workfront and Experience Manager Assets.
Now, with the addition of AJO, businesses can create hyper-personalization at scale to meet the ever-increasing demands for content and tailored customer experiences, providing a powerful and efficient solution for modern marketing challenges.
Trusted Adobe Edge Delivery experts and award-winning partners
As the leading Adobe Partner for Edge Delivery Services and a recent winner of the Adobe Digital Partner of the Year Award for Central Europe, we have been involved in this cutting-edge technology since it was still being built at Adobe R&D. We implemented it on our website and were the first Adobe partner to launch it for clients too. We’re the trusted experts for Adobe Edge Delivery Services and we’re expanding its capabilities every day.
Talk to our experts about this solution to personalizing Edge Delivery Services-run sites: