☕[AT Community Q&A Coffee Break] 1/13/21, 8am PT: Robert Calangiu, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Target☕

[Amelia_Waliany]

Join us for the next monthly Adobe Target Community Q&A Coffee Break, 

taking place Wednesday, January 13th, 2021 @ 8am PT

👨‍💻☕👩‍💻REGISTER TODAY👨‍💻☕👩‍💻

We'll be joined by Robert Calangiu, aka @Robert_Calangiu,  Senior Product Manager for Adobe Target, who will be signed in here to the Adobe Target Community to chat directly with you on this thread about your Adobe Target questions pertaining to his areas of expertise:

• Target Setup and Admin UI
• A4T Integration
• AEM Integration
• General Adobe Target UI 
• Plus! Responses to the questions you include upon registering for this event (though optional)

🎯REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE  🎯

• Must be signed in to the Community during the 1-hour period 
• Must post a Question about Adobe Target
• THAT'S IT!  *(think of this as the Adobe Target Community equivalent of an AMA, (“Ask Me Anything”), and bring your best speed-typing game) 

🎯INSTRUCTIONS 🎯

• Click the blue “Reply” button at the bottom right corner of this post
• Begin your Question with @Robert_Calangiu
• When exchanging messages with Robert about your specific question, be sure to use the editor’s "QUOTE" button, which will indicate which post you're replying to, and will help contain your conversation with Robert

💡Want us to send you a calendar invitation so you don’t forget?  Register now to mark your calendar and receive Reminders! 

Robert Calangiu is a Senior Product Manager responsible for evolving Adobe Target's UI.  He was in charge with redesigning the Admin UI and now he is focusing on improving the Activity UI as well as with enhancing the A4T integration. Previously, Robert worked as a product manager for Adobe’s TV Everywhere portfolio, leading Authentication & Fraud Management solutions. He is passionate about building customer centric products and helping customers solve the right problems.

Curious about what an Adobe Target Community Q&A Coffee Break looks like? Be sure to check out our past 2020 Adobe Target Coffee Breaks, covering a WIDE variety of Adobe Target topics!

[josejr19]

@Robert_Calangiu are there any plans to update the Target UI? If so any details around being able to better organize activities and experience fragments specifically?

[Robert_Calangiu]

That's a great question!

We have started a process to update Target UI and its underlying tech stack in order to improve its performance, stability and usability. We are taking a step-by-step approach here by updating different areas of the Target UI, one by one.

For example, as many of you might have noticed, we have already updated the Administration section altogether.

Now we are actively working on updating the Audiences section.

For Activities List UI, we have started to build some new design concepts and we are validating them with a couple of customers. We would like to update the UI of this section later this year and offer a better way of visualizing and organizing activities for all Target users.

[josejr19]

@Robert_Calangiu if there is an opportunity to provide feedback on the designs being tested, please let me know. Would like to contribute if possible.

Thanks!

[josejr19]

@Robert_Calangiu are you able to confirm at what point Target calls Audience Manager to user segment information? Is it on every mbox call, only when the mbox has an activity that uses an AAM segment, only when the user has an ID sync complete, etc…

[Robert_Calangiu]

Hi @josejr19 ,

I will answer this question by giving you a high level overview of how the integration between Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager works. These are the main steps:

 
1. When a user navigates to a website powered by Target, when the page loads, Target mBox(es) ping Audience Manager -> so this happens on every mbox call
2. Audience Manager then delivers the audience segment data to Target using a server-to-server call
3. Target updates the content in each mBox based on the user's audience segment

Here you can find more information about the AAM-Target integration: https://helpx.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/how-to/target-aam.html#SolutionPlanningAndIntegrationArchite...

[josejr19]

@Robert_Calangiu are there any plans to update the Adobe Target 1.0 API? Right now if you create an activity via API you can only update it via the API versus also being able to update it in the UI.

[Robert_Calangiu]

The answer to this question is tied to a previous question regarding the update of Target UI.

As part of our effort of updating the entire Target UI, we are also updating the backend that supports the user interface and its APIs. By updating the backend, going further we will eliminate this impediment and the possible inconsistencies generated. Once we update a section in Target UI, users will be able to update their entities using either UI or API and the changes will reflect in both.

[josejr19]

@Robert_Calangiu Any updates on the Adobe AEP CDP integration with Target for activation?

[Robert_Calangiu]

Hi @josejr19 ,

Happy to share some updates on the integration between Target and Adobe Experience Platform.

• On the implementation side, the new Adobe Experience Platform SDK incorporates Target web SDK and comes with a huge improvement in performance and latency, reducing the number of calls needed to initialize multiple Adobe solutions like: Visitor service, Analytics, Target and Audience Manager (each one needed its own library) to a single network call.
  Our new Web SDK is more than 70% smaller than our current combined libraries, and significantly faster. More info here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/edge/home.html?lang=en
• Much more, Target will integrate with AEP in order to enrich Target audiences with AEP segments

Stay tuned for product announcements at Adobe Summit: https://summit.adobe.com/na/

We have a session at Summit where product experts will discuss Target's integration with AEP's real-time customer profile.

[allexxpallexx]

@Robert_Calangiu - Question/feature request about “Activity Rendered”

In addition to the existing metrics “Activity Impressions” and “Activity Conversions” for AT activities, can you populate and pass the metric i.e. “Activity Rendered” for usage in A4T for AA. This would make users able to isolate and calculate conversion rates also for only those activity impressions that actually are rendered and exposed for the users visually.

This way every customer would not need to face the challenge with uncertainty about the existing metrics and then reaching out to Internet forums and Adobe Support for causes, feedback or workaround solutions.

[josejr19]

Hi @allexxpallexx, I am interested to see what Robert says on this one as well. The technical challenge here is how does Adobe Target "know" the activity was actually "rendered" from the server side to pass to Adobe Analytics that hit level data. I have seen this before and in my previous experience we summed it up to 2 options below.

Option 1 - Pass in the activity name as an evar only when we knew it was rendered using the Target success rendered event. This results in the data being passed into Adobe Analytics as an evar you can then add into reporting and count as a custom metric. I think the main trade off here is that you need to use another evar.

Option 2 - When configuring the goals and settings for the activity and after setting Adobe Analytics as the reporting source, for the primary goal we could set conversion is the primary metric, and then viewed a unique mbox as the action. Then when the activity is rendered on the visitor side, we fire an mbox with the unique name set in the field for the "viewed mbox action". This results in the data being passed into Adobe Analytics as the out of the box A4T "activity conversion" metric. I think the main trade off here is having to fire an additional mbox call and that activity conversion I believe is not a title you can edit.

They both require development work where we need to listen to the Target success rendered event and then add the data to the Adobe Analytics object before we fire the beacon or to fire the custom mbox with the unique mbox name. Both manageable in Adobe Launch.

Hopes this helps!

[allexxpallexx]

Hi @josejr19 

I've gotten feedback from out consulting agency and can see some blogs about this topic and it seems to be an issue for quite some companies. I've also posted this as a feature request through the Adobe Service Desk (support).

I'm not that keen in creating some kind of workaround for this. I think this is a kind of feature that Adobe hopefully would address and integrate in their product features.

I'm excited and looking forward to see the response Adobe has on this feature request!

[Robert_Calangiu]

Hi @allexxpallexx, this is not possible right now out of the box, it is a feature request that we need to look into.

We allow the users to select their desired custom Analytics metrics when using A4T reporting: in Goals select Analytics as reporting source and an Analytics metric of their choice.
I think that the options provided by @josejr19 to solve the use case you described are valid, thanks for chiming in.

[Robert_Calangiu]

Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us on this thread, hope you all have a good morning or evening. I’m looking forward to answering your Target questions!

[kcsf]

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@josejr19 wrote:

@Robert_Calangiu are there any plans to update the Target UI? If so any details around being able to better organize activities and experience fragments specifically?

---

1. We are using Target to create messaging spaces in our SPA, however, this the element we are targeting persists on other views of the SPA and this happens, as you know, because that element we are targeting in the css is available in other views in the SPA. Can you tell me what I need to do in order to keep the banner on a specific view?

2. we would like to create an "interstitial" or "modal" after a user clicks on a banner. what script is needed for this to happen?

Thanks so much!

[skylerj92693058]

@Robert_Calangiu - What's the A4T capabilities when leveraging Recommendations Engine? Any additional reporting we can get from the Recs Engine directly? 

[Robert_Calangiu]

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@skylerj92693058 wrote:

@Robert_Calangiu - What's the A4T capabilities when leveraging Recommendations Engine? Any additional reporting we can get from the Recs Engine directly? 

---

Hi @skylerj92693058 , 

The same Recommendations reports that are available when using Target as the reporting source are also available when using Analytics as the reporting source. When using Analytics as the reporting source, reports can be viewed in Target and/or Analysis Workspace, off of the same data set.

Does it answer your question?

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu Unfortunaltely I have not found a simple way to show how many activities we have in which type (A/B, XT, AT...) as it always states "More than 100 Activities found" why can it no show the exact number?

Filtering by Type does only help if ther are less than 100.

Thanks

[Robert_Calangiu]

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@Nicolas_Swisscom wrote:

@Robert_Calangiu Unfortunaltely I have not found a simple way to show how many activities we have in which type (A/B, XT, AT...) as it always states "More than 100 Activities found" why can it no show the exact number?

Filtering by Type does only help if ther are less than 100.

Thanks

---

Now we are using infinite scrolling and loading the entire list of activities at once it is not optimal, especially when having hundreds or thousands of activities.

When you are scrolling down the activity list you will see (more than 100, more than 200, more than 300 and so on).

This is something that we will try to address when we will update the Activity List UI by offering better filtering and searching capabilities.

[rjb45443778]

@Robert_Calangiu how would I go about sending Audience information to Adobe Target via Server Side implementation?