How to find the competitive EDGE with Adobe

The digital transformation boom of the past five years is slowing down, replaced instead by a focus on maximising the value of your existing tech stack.

Now, smaller incremental changes are the name of the game rather than huge overhauls, with the focus on delivering faster speed to market; quicker, relevant content and more dynamic customer experiences.

Introducing Adobe Edge Delivery Services, a high-performance storefront from Adobe Commerce. Adobe Edge provides top-tier CMS capabilities, SaaS services, and innovative Commerce components, called Drop ins, for faster, streamlined consumer experiences.   It enables businesses to progressively upgrade their storefronts on Adobe Commerce without requiring a complete tech overhaul and create content easily without developer involvement.

To find out more, SQLI spoke with Shaun McCran, Head of Product Marketing for Adobe Commerce, EMEA, about how Adobe Edge Delivery Services is setting a new standard in content delivery.

The need for speed

According to a report by Google, 53 per cent of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds. 

Google's Core Web Vitals principles include Lighthouse scores, which evaluate a website's performance across several metrics to generate a rating from zero to 100. A high score can positively impact a site's SEO ranking, boosting its position on the search engine results page and achieving better visibility. This drives more organic traffic to the site, where users experience better performance and are more likely to stay.

Typically, when developing a new site, developers start from scratch to create the storefront. After the initial build, they test its performance and check the Lighthouse score, which often falls around 30 to 40. From there, the goal is to improve performance by incrementally redeveloping the site to improve the speed.

However, with Adobe Edge Delivery Services, performance-based architecture, the code base starts at a Lighthouse score of 100, meaning that when you download and run the code in its vanilla form,  it is super-fast.

Shaun said: “A brand can spend weeks and thousands of pounds in development trying to improve a score of 35 upwards, aiming for 100. It is incredibly hard to get there because the fundamental building blocks were never designed to hit 100.

“Shoppers have high expectations for fast experiences. Adobe Edge Delivery Service not only accelerates these experiences but also positively impacts SEO.  In one example, a customer’s organic visitors trebled after moving to Adobe Edge Delivery Services. They didn't change the website. They didn't re-engineer it. They just moved the technology from Luma to Edge Delivery. And because Google prioritise these faster, more responsive, experience-driven sites in SEO rankings, it led to substantial traffic growth.

“So, it's not just about faster experiences. The speed brings additional benefits,” he said.

Flexible and fast content creation

In today’s highly competitive digital market, content is crucial. Brands need to react quickly to market changes, sales data, and competitors and fast content delivery is essential for staying ahead.

Adobe Edge Delivery Services provides flexible content delivery in the shape of document-based authoring. This allows users to create, update and publish content using authoring tools that are already familiar to business roles, such as Microsoft Word, Excel or even Google Docs.

Even better, its composable make-up allows commerce components to be dropped into the static content pages, meaning different teams can own their business area without the need for developers and ensuring even quicker delivery to market.

Shaun said: “It's very easy for a non-technical user to build static content webpages. Content creators can create their content on Word Docs, Google Docs, or others, you can add tables, graphs, images and video, then publish it straight away as a web page.

“Then the commerce elements can be dropped in. It gives you the option to have people creating CMS content in one space and not overlapping with commerce components such as product placements, giving your team more flexibility. It also significantly reduces costs by minimising the reliance on developers and, of course, saves considerable time in the process."

In addition to content creation, Adobe Edge Delivery Services also provides comprehensive analytics and reporting tools that offer insights into content delivery performance and customer journeys through the site. This data enables content providers to optimise their strategies, identify potential bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to enhance user experiences.

Personalisation at scale made easier

By streamlining your content workflow through document-based authoring, you're saving time, allowing teams to focus more on crafting personalised content.

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic across all business areas these days, and Edge Delivery Services offers a feature called Generate Variations, enabling authors to produce content tailored to specific segments. This feature leverages Generative AI services to generate different versions of a page, across both text and images. As a result, it allows you to create a number of page variations, with the most successful experiences rising to the top to drive engagement and revenue.

Adobe has simplified and accelerated this process, significantly reducing the time typically required for these tasks.

Shaun emphasised: "Optimising personalisation is essential with today’s digital services. The goal is to deliver a personalised end-to-end customer journey across all channels seamlessly and consistently. This is facilitated by solutions that reduce manual effort, enabling people to focus on strategy and value creation."