Inter-page (100 ms – 10 s)
Example. Next-page personalization. Transactional emails like password reset. Room-key delivery for online hotel check-in.
Technical approach. Edge decisioning (e.g. Fastly, AEP Edge Decisioning). The event emitted interacts with edge resources and immediately responds with varying behavior.
Operational consideration — propagation across modalities. When the same activation needs to surface across multiple channels with different latency budgets, the architecture must reconcile them. Example: an edge interaction yields a Free Ice Cream Cone coupon that's immediately visible on the user's mobile phone, but the Point-of-Sale terminal at the redemption location updates only every 30 minutes. The architecture must make the disparity acceptable to the use case.
Historical note. This was a key role of Adobe Audience Manager — the combination of traits and trait state changes implies customer progression through a journey (e.g. Mortgage Interest → Mortgage Product Selection → Info Submission → Mortgage Quote).
Common use cases. Transactional emails (password reset), online hotel check-in room-key delivery, next-page personalization.