☕[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!

[Robert_Calangiu]

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@rrrrrraul wrote:

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

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Hi @rrrrrraul , 

Below you have the documentation available for integrating Target & Audience Manager via Server Side implementation with an example:

https://developers.adobetarget.com/api/delivery-api/#section/Integration-with-Experience-Cloud/Adobe...

Hope this answers your question.

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu Would you have any update on the know issue that there can be data discrapencies when using A4T together with Redirects in Target?

[Drburns27]

@Nicolas_Swisscom  Hi Nicolas!  There is often not a data discrepancy with redirects in A$T; this only arises when the Adobe Analytics and Target tags are firing in an irregular way.  An audit can uncover this and adjustments to the tags can be made to support redirects, in these remote situations.  There are many companies successfully executing redirect activities across their customer experience leveraging A4T currently.  The need to audit/confirm the firing of tags will not be a requirement when companies move to the Experience Platform Web SDK, or Alloy.js, in the near future which will consolidate the tags for Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, and Adobe Target and streamline data collection and communication between the applications!

[ca90883831]

@Robert_Calangiu

Hello, all my questions below are for “form based exp composer”:

1. We use form based experience composer to create Target A/B test. Currently we are using a few regular mboxes on the page. Can I introduce Target global mbox together with regular mbox? aka. Is there an issue to mix global mbox and regular mboxes together? If global mbox better than regular mbox?
2. I understand we can use “targetPageParams” to pass additional parameters to global mbox.  In at.js 2.x, the global mbox uses 2 functions [adobe.target.getOffer() & adobe.target.applyOffer()]. But how does Target know where exactly to apply offers on a page when using global mbox? With regular mbox, you wrap content in <div>. With global mbox, how to specify the location on the page?
3. We have 1 target account shared across 2 different teams for 2 different domains. So if my team switches to use global mbox, the other team also need to make the same change?
4. When passing parameters to global mbox using “targetPageParams”, is there any preference to use one method over the other 2 ?  “An array” or “JSON” object or “Query String”, which one is better?

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu There are many places in the Target UI i.e. when seting up an activity where the only very few characters can be use (naming of experiences, goals, metrics etc....). Will this be extended?

[Robert_Calangiu]

@Nicolas_Swisscom indeed we have some limits in place right now, but I would love to hear more on your needs? Why you would like to extend these limits, on what entities and how this would help you better do your job? Looking forward for more info here.

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

Quite often we just have not enough space to decribe what this or that Experience is about. And A, B, C is not enough. But where it is very often a challenge is in the metrics naming. Often here we can not give a meaningful title here such as "Viewed Samsung FE 5g FAQ page DE" although the text box suggest much more space would result in "Viewed Samsung FE 5g FAQ". Many colleagues also use the German language to name experiences or metrics and as you know German is ca. 30% more in terms of characters/text compared to English. Any chances this gets changed? Why is it limited to only 25 characters?

[Robert_Calangiu]

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@Nicolas_Swisscom wrote:

Quite often we just have not enough space to decribe what this or that Experience is about. And A, B, C is not enough. But where it is very often a challenge is in the metrics naming. Often here we can not give a meaningful title here such as "Viewed Samsung FE 5g FAQ page DE" although the text box suggest much more space would result in "Viewed Samsung FE 5g FAQ". Many colleagues also use the German language to name experiences or metrics and as you know German is ca. 30% more in terms of characters/text compared to English. Any chances this gets changed? Why is it limited to only 25 characters?

---

Thanks for providing the context!

We will look into it and consider your recommendation.

[andyprout82]

@Robert_Calangiu I'm new to using Adobe Target so bit of a beginners question but currently having an issue where I can't see any mbox calls being made on the pages I am looking to test. Should I create a new mbox for every element of the page I want to test?

[Drburns27]

@andyprout82 This is strange; are you sure that you've implemented AT.js in the location you are executing activities?  The js library file may not be implemented in this location, which would be the likely cause of not seeing server calls.  An mbox is no longer required around every element you wish to run an activity with; it's all delivered through a single tag to the page and the VEC or form-based composer.

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu Would it be possible to make the "Objective" field under Activity Setting mandatory by configuring it somewhere in the setup?

[Robert_Calangiu]

@Nicolas_Swisscom , the "Objective" field under the "Goals&Settings" section is currently optional because it is mostly used as a detailed description of what are the objectives and goals you want to achieve with this activity. Some users are populating it and some of them don't. 

How making it mandatory will help you (or your team) in your day-to-day work? 

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu It would help the team to be forced to state a clear objective so that others who might have to edit the activity or interpretate the results know what the objective of that test/activity is. Right know you either know it or don't know what a given activity does or has as an objective. It I could somehow configure this field to be mandatory we would significantly increase transparancy for all activities.

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

@Robert_Calangiu In relation to Auto-Target the Target documentationsays: "In the future, this test bed will allow us to open our machine learning platform to our data-savvy clients so that they can bring in their own models to augment Target’s models."

Would you know when, where and how we can "bring our own model"?

[Robert_Calangiu]

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@Nicolas_Swisscom wrote:

@Robert_Calangiu In relation to Auto-Target the Target documentationsays: "In the future, this test bed will allow us to open our machine learning platform to our data-savvy clients so that they can bring in their own models to augment Target’s models."

Would you know when, where and how we can "bring our own model"?

---

The "bring your own model" or "Auto-Target with Custom Model powered by AEP" capability is currently in development.

I don't have a fixed release date that I can offer in this moment.

[ca90883831]

@Robert_Calangiu

Hello, repost my previous questions: 

All my questions below are for “form based exp composer”:

1. We use form based experience composer to create Target A/B test. Currently we are using a few regular mboxes on the page. Can I introduce Target global mbox together with regular mbox? aka. Is there an issue to mix global mbox and regular mboxes together? Is global mbox better than regular mbox? 
2. I understand we can use “targetPageParams” to pass additional parameters to global mbox.  In at.js 2.x, the global mbox uses 2 functions [adobe.target.getOffer() & adobe.target.applyOffer()]. But how does Target know where exactly to apply offers on a page when using global mbox? With regular mbox, you wrap content in <div>. With global mbox, how to specify the location on the page?
3. We have 1 target account shared across 2 different teams for 2 different domains. So if my team switches to use global mbox, the other team also need to make the same change?
4. When passing parameters to global mbox using “targetPageParams”, is there any preference to use one method over the other 2 ?  “An array” or “JSON” object or “Query String”, which one is better?

[josejr19]

@ca90883831 wanted to provide some feedback in case you might be interested...

1. My experience is that you can have multiple mboxes placed on the page this includes a global mbox and a custom mboxes. I like to think of the global mbox as the one you fire on each page. This will make sure we can introduce experiences into the page using the VEC editor. Then if we have unique experiences using the form based editor, we then use a dedicated custom mbox so as to limit the scope.

2. Since the global mbox is focused on supporting use cases that leverage the VEC editor, and the VEC editor in turn captures a css selector from the user from one of the options when editing(insert after, before, or manually), the global mbox response on the client side will always have a "selector" value under "action" object. You can actually pass in this key value pair in your applyOffer() function and when the at.js script runs the script it will do the same and find the css selector and inject the html into that spot.

3. The auto create global mbox is something you can control at the script level, so you can create two versions of the script for each domain. Additionally if you use Launch you can control it from there.

4. Typically arrays perform slightly better than objects in terms of efficiency. I dont know if the at.js script has any conditions that look at one over the other first as an example therefor being executed faster.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

[ca90883831]

@josejr19  thanks very much!

Do you know if global mbox would work with FEC (form based experience composer)? Im trying to figure out how to specify the testing location on the page with FEC+Global mbox implementation. 

FEC + Local mbox makes more sense to me, but i'm researching on the FEC + Global option. Very limited resource online as far as I can tell. 

[josejr19]

@ca90883831 Yes you can use the global mbox in a form base edited experience. The only thing is you will need to manage how that code gets injected into the css selector of choice if you want to inject html mark up. If you want to run code then it should just execute right away. The experiences you create using the VEC will also come in the same global mbox but will have an additional attribute that is processed by the at.js script which is the "action" attribute. This value is typically "insertAfter", "insertBefore", or "setHTML" and is as a result of how the content was set when the VEC editor was used. But for form base edited experiences this attribute is not included and theres no way of providing this when authoring the experience. You will need to think of a scalable solution possibly that can take response that dont have an action attribute but have html markup in the content attribute. 

Hope this helps!

[ca90883831]

@josejr19

VEC doesn't apply to us because of our iframe structure, that's why i'm only looking at FEC.

So it sounds like FEC + reginal mbox is the best way to go and disregard the global mbox. 

Pro: we are able to inject the html offers into any reginal mbox, it's flexible, scalable and accurate. 

con: if we need to launch testing on a new location on a page, we need to rely on engineering team to wrap that content with new reginal mbox. so there is a dependence. 

Do you agree?   

[josejimenezjr]

switching from personal account.