January 24, 2025
Discover how Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets transforms digital asset management. Streamline workflows, enhance findability, and maximize content efficiency.
Travis Melton
Managing today’s digital assets—ranging from product imagery and logos to videos and beyond—presents a growing challenge for organizations. DAM systems often house hundreds of thousands of files, making it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to find the exact content needed. This inefficiency not only drains resources, but also disrupts the momentum of delivering seamless consumer experiences.
That’s why one piece of modernizing your content supply chain involves optimizing your asset management strategy. This is where Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets comes in.
AEM Assets is more than an asset management platform; it's a strategic asset that can transform the way your organization manages, discovers, and reuses content. The platform’s true potential emerges when integrated with the broader Adobe ecosystem—unlocking advanced capabilities like analytics-driven insights, AI-powered asset tagging, and collaborative workflows.
However, to fully capitalize on this investment, teams must implement strategic initiatives and adhere to best practices that enhance efficiency and streamline operations.
By focusing on improving asset reusability and findability—through smarter metadata practices, robust analytics, and intuitive asset organization—organizations can align their digital asset management system with larger business goals.
Elevate Asset Management Efficiency with Four Actionable Steps
#1 – Leverage Metadata to Facilitate Search
When uploading new assets into AEM, metadata is crucial in ensuring assets are discoverable by your team. The data points in your metadata – such as campaign name, file type, and smart tags – can be searched to retrieve assets and filter search results, cutting down on execution time and manual labor.
The standard search function in AEM uses the metadata associated with the assets. For example, if your organization has every asset in AEM marked with metadata that describes which campaign the asset is part of, this would enable your team to easily locate an image from a specific campaign, e.g., “June 2024 nurture campaign.”
At MERGE, we typically consider these three categories of metadata:
Detailed Metadata
Since assets are any type of digital file ranging from images, documents, spreadsheets, Photoshop files, or InDesign files, each of these file types will have specific metadata associated with it.
Metadata around image assets can be basic – such as the file name, description, file size, aspect ratio, or details specific to images, such as the shot information with focal length, f-number, and orientation. The thing to remember is that metadata describes the asset.
Custom Metadata
Custom metadata will reflect your team’s unique naming conventions and the culture of your organization. How does your team talk about the assets, and how are assets named internally? Your custom metadata can include details such as project or campaign name, month and year, or even specific tags or keywords that align with your team's processes, making it easier to manage and retrieve assets effectively.
Users can also leverage custom metadata to ensure deactivation at the appropriate time (for example, if the asset is specific to a certain month or year).
Smart Tags
Smart tags are AI-generated tags on assets that help with search findability.
Specific to AEM, smart tags are part of the Adobe offering within AEM. There are ways to train AEM to recognize key details in assets, or users can simply upload assets and see what AEM comes back with. Below is an example of a screenshot from OOTB AEM assets – the smart tags that AEM assigned to the image can be seen in the green box.
It’s important to remember that if no metadata exists, it cannot be searched. This is why it’s crucial to ensure that adding metadata is part of your team’s processes and onboarding. If team members neglect this seemingly small yet important task, assets will be indiscoverable and locating assets will become tedious and time-consuming.
Not to mention, your AEM instance will be disorganized and not leveraged to its fullest ability, causing your team to lose on AEM’s valuable investment. Be sure to enforce metadata and ensure team members are routinely filling in all the information available.
#2 – Close the Feedback Loop: Bring Usage Statistics to the Forefront
Within the individual asset, users can view analytics on the Insights tab. Being able to identify which assets are performing well and why will help your team learn which assets to reuse or revise.
Fueled by Adobe Analytics, users can gain insights into impressions and usage statistics on the assets. Understanding where assets are being used, and how effectively they are being used, can help organizations determine the reuse or revision of assets.
If your team hasn’t done so already, connect your AEM instance to Adobe Analytics to gain access to analytics on your assets.
Another key tool for analytics within AEM is Adobe GenStudio. GenStudio not only enables the rapid generation of content and assets, but also tracks the impact of that content, enabling marketers to refine the assets used in creating their campaigns.
#3 – Create Collections: Logical Image Groupings
Part of making assets findable and usable is ensuring they are sharable. Requiring every user in your AEM instance to search for imagery can be time-consuming and unnecessary if the search has already been done.
As the name implies, users can curate collections of assets within AEM that can then be shared as needed. Collections can group assets based on any criteria needed, and they can be curated from individual selections or set up through a smart collection by a search.
Collections reference the asset, meaning the assets stay in the correct location, no duplicates are created, and no assets are moved, whereas creating a folder would create a new location of the asset and potentially move the asset.
By leveraging collections, the asset is correctly identified and users can seamlessly download the asset from there.
For example, if you are looking for imagery with snow, users can go into assets and search for images with snow. From here, they can start a collection of the assets and name it after their campaign. Users can share these collections with their team, ensuring only pre-vouched images are selected.
Search can often fall short, as it would showcase every image with snow according to metadata and AI, however, collections help refine search and improve the user experience.
#4 – Leverage a Folder Structure That Facilitates Discoverability
Folder structure is your organization’s foundational backbone. A thoughtful folder structure is critical for locating saved assets, yet this is usually the last way a user searches for an asset, making the first points more relevant.
The reuse of assets starts with awareness of the asset's existence. A well-thought-out folder structure will lead to an intuitive navigation of the folder structure by the users.
An intuitive folder structure will make it easier for your team to locate assets and will also be more efficient. For example, try to avoid folders that are five or six levels deep and aim for simplicity instead. Digging through folders can be time-consuming and assets can get lost. Aim for two to three layers and leverage metadata to easily locate assets.
Unlock the Full Potential of AEM
Adobe Experience Manager empowers teams to work asynchronously and enhances efficiency by streamlining workflows, reducing execution time, and minimizing manual tasks. With AEM, your team can focus on creating impactful, results-driven content while maximizing the value of your digital asset management system.
If your organization needs help optimizing AEM, the Adobe experts at MERGE can help. Get in touch.
