Understanding Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager
What’s the number one way to beat your competition? Why maximizing the impact of every digital experience, of course!
Sure, this sounds easy on paper. But when you’re an enterprise that has millions of customers across dozens of geographies, creating digital experiences that are timely and relevant is no easy feat.
Enter Edge Delivery Services for Adobe Experience Manager. If you are out at Adobe MAX this week, you probably already know what I’m talking about. If you’ve been stuck behind your desk (like I have been), allow me to quickly get you up to speed…
In this post, I’ll delve into what Edge Delivery Services is, what it offers, and why you’d be crazy not to take a closer look.
What is Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager?
Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is a set of composable services designed to enhance the capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager, along with expanded content authoring capabilities.
EDS exponentially improves website performance, shortens development processes, democratizes authoring at scale, and enables real-time experimentation to drive better engagement. Gone are the days or weeks it has typically taken to make changes on digital properties; now content can be published and edited in seconds.
Sounds Interesting, Tell Me More…
Picture this. You’re a CMO that is consistently frustrated because the experiences your teams are putting out are disjointed, generic, and slow to get to market. Your website has poor performance, and your CEO has just set even higher acquisition targets for your already overworked team.
Or maybe you’re a content author. Your creative juices are on point and you’re ready to go with 10 awesome new pieces, but you rely on your tech team for publishing (which is always slow and tedious because of bandwidth and resource limitations).
Or maybe you’re on the developer side of the house feeling immense pressure to facilitate all these great experiences but you’re saddled with outdated tech.
If you can relate to any of the above, Edge Delivery Services is an absolute gamechanger for your business.
Traditional Content Management vs. Edge Delivery Services
Traditional content management systems (CMS) have been focused on simply creating, managing, and publishing content. The impact of that content is either an afterthought or not a concern at all. The problem is that this creates a vicious cycle. Content gets created, it doesn’t convert, marketers try to pinpoint why, but need to quickly move onto XYZ. And the cycle continues…
But if the content and experiences you’re creating aren’t actually delivering value for your business, the bigger question is why are you even creating them at all?
3 Ways Edge Delivery Can Drive a Realistic Impact for Your Business
- Site Speed and Performance: These are two of the most critical factors of your site and what users first notice. Site slow to load? I’m headed directly over to your competition! Poor performance? You just got dinged by Google with a direct impact to SEO. In fact, according to Google, 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
EDS eliminates speed and performance struggles with its performance-first architecture.
What exactly does that mean? EDS starts you off with an optimized code foundation, loads prominent parts of pages first (known as phased content rendering), and allows you to maintain performance and easily identify dips with Continual Real-user Monitoring (RUM). One EDS customer saw a 19% increase in SEO visits, 40% increase in engaged visits, and 30% longer average time on page. Sure, you could devote a bunch of time and very expensive resources to making incremental improvements in performance. Or you could start using EDS today.
- Extreme Content Velocity: EDS can meet authors wherever they are. WYSIWYG authoring – check! Headless authoring—got that, too! Document-based authoring? Of course! Wait, document-based authoring?! With document-based authoring there’s no more copying and pasting. Content can be created, updated, and published directly from familiar authoring tools such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You can even take it a step further and set up experimentation and A/B testing right in your content authoring workflows. Test versions of pages, different layouts, imagery, CTAs, and more.
Plus, an automated chatbot can give you insights in real-time. Simply ping your friendly chatbot and he/she will tell you exactly how your page is performing up-to-the-second.
(P.S. Worried about governance? I was too. Document-authoring allows you to control who can edit, view, and publish based on permissions, as well as offers full access to version history, comment history, and more.)
- Rapid Development: Instead of a linear approach where content sits somewhere in the middle of a lengthy process, EDS actually starts with content, and development and design happen in parallel. This allows for faster iteration and development at lightning-fast speed. Think 700 pages in under 4 weeks or 12-weeks to a full site launch in multiple languages. Pretty mind-blowing, am I right?
How Does Edge Delivery Services Fit with Other Adobe Experience Cloud Products?
While you are laser focused on developing great customer experiences, Adobe is laser focused on you. So, it’s no surprise that EDS fits seamlessly within the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem.
Already have Adobe Experience Manager Sites? Great! Edge Delivery Services and Sites can co-exist on the same domain—and even co-leverage content (in fact, this is a very common use case for larger websites).
Already using Adobe Experience Manager Assets? Even better. Images from your AEM Assets repository can be pulled into document-based authoring workflows via a sidekick plugin.
Lastly, Edge Delivery Services can be used in conjunction with Adobe Target, Analytics, and Launch (although EDS does have native experimentation capabilities so it’s worth exploring your organization’s needs for this functionality).
Bringing it All Together with LeapPoint & Connected Work®
As you can clearly see, Edge Delivery Services is a revolutionary tool that will help businesses grow revenue, drive quality conversions, and develop highly engaging digital experiences at scale.
As an Adobe Gold Solutions Partner, LeapPoint has thousands of hours of Adobe-related technical implementation expertise. We know the ins and outs of not only Edge Delivery Services and Adobe Experience Manager, but how you can connect those tools with the rest of your Adobe stack (and beyond) to build a full-blown content supply chain that drives greater efficiency, productivity, and value for your organization.
Interested in learning more? Let’s chat!
Megan Cacioppo, Director of Marketing
