[AT Community Q&A Coffee Break] 4/27/22, 8am PT: Jim McTiernan, Principal Solutions Consultant

[Amelia_Waliany]

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

taking place Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 @ 8am PT - 9am PT 

~ Be sure to REGISTER HERE to receive email reminders and a calendar hold ~

We'll be joined by Jim McTiernan aka @Jim_McTiernan, Principal Solutions Consultant, 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:

• Adobe Target Recommendations
• AB Testing and MVT
• Personalization

Simon Chen aka @simochen, Technical Support Engineer, will also be in the thread to provide further guidance around the above topics with Jim!

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 @Jim_McTiernan 
• When exchanging messages with Jim 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 Jim

Jim McTiernan has been involved in the optimization space since 2009 when he joined Adobe Corporation. Currently, Jim is an Adobe Cloud Expert, specializing in Adobe Target.

Curious about what an Adobe Target Community Q&A Coffee Break looks like? Be sure to check out the thread from our latest 3/30/22 Adobe Target Coffee Break with Senior Expert Solutions Consultant, Ry...

[Kishore_Reddy]

Amazing! Looking forward to connecting with Jim soon

Thank for organizing this session!

[Nina_Antonova]

Hi @Jim_McTiernan,

I'm a beginner when it comes to Recommendations and would appreciate a direction on how I should think when approaching the following use case. 

Entities in my Target catalogue have category tags. It can be one or several categories per entity, e.g. "Destination: UK", "Type: Families with kids".

Currently, to start somewhere, I'm testing very simple recommendation logics using Profile Scripts and custom algorithms, i.e. based on a certain visitor profile attribute value, I'm bringing in a specific entity id (e.g. the route you were interested in = A, then offer X will be shown). It's a manual 1:1 business logic that is stored in a CSV file and uploaded as a custom criteria. 

With time, the number of entities will increase, and more than 1 recommendation entity will pass based on visitor profile. I want to use categories then and set priorities between them. For example, if a customer profile contains an attribute indicating this customer want to travel to the UK with kids, I want the offers (entities) that have both categories "Type: Families with kids" & "Destination: UK" to be shown first. If there are no offers like these, then just offers with the category "Type: Families with kids", and so on. 

Where and how can I set such a logic, listening to both entity categories and visitor profiles? Is it a combination of Profile Scripts and custom criteria uploaded as CSV files? Or should I think somehow differently and use some specific Target UI features when creating my custom criteria? 

Many thanks for tips and ideas!

/Nina

[Jim_McTiernan]

Hi Nina,

Great questions. As the answer here is more involved, I thought I would reply ahead of the Coffee Break.

First, there is a way to automate the process you have now for matching profile attributes to entity values. It is called Profile Attribute matching and it can be set-up in the Criteria builder. See: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/recommendations/criteria/dynamic-static/profile...

There is also a way to use the above capability with list values (e.g. matching several categories). See the "Is/Is not contained in list" operator options described here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/recommendations/criteria/dynamic-static/use-dyn...

Where you want to prioritize a profile match of 2 categories over one category, I think you will need to set-up multiple category values for that use case. Target has a capability called Category Affinity where multiple category values can be ranked (e.g. first favorite category, second favorite category etc) -- see link below. Once you have multiple categories per profile, you can then use Profile Attribute matching (Criteria rule noted above) to do an 'and' match. For example, I want my Criteria inclusion rule to match first favorite category and second favorite category ('destination uk' and 'family with kids'). See: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/audiences/visitor-profiles/category-affinity.ht...

Finally, where you want Criteria to sequence (show 2 category matches first, then one), you can use Criteria Sequencing for that. You would create 2 Criteria (one with inclusion rule to match 2 categories and one with rule to match only 1 category), and place them in a Criteria Sequence. See: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/recommendations/criteria/create-criteria-sequen...

HTH

Jim

[Jim_McTiernan]

I also meant to add the Help link covering Category Affinity in my response above (also just added link above): https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/audiences/visitor-profiles/category-affinity.ht...

[Nina_Antonova]

Thanks a ton, @Jim_McTiernan. This is incredibly helpful! And thanks for taking your time ahead of the Coffee Break, so much appreciated

[Jim_McTiernan]

Hello everyone, Jim McTiernan here, I am happy to field your Target questions today, along with some of my colleagues.

[aturpin]

Hello Jim,

Why are there two target extensions installed in launch-- both version 1 and version 2? What's the difference? 

Thanks!

Ashley

[Jim_McTiernan]

As there are 2 versions of at.js library (1.x and 2.x), there are two extensions in Launch for each (v1 and v2), depending on which at.js library you wish to use.

[iliketesting]

Hi @Jim_McTiernan , 

We are setting up Recommendations. What are some of the most common ways of extracting/exporting the catalog entity data out of Target.  For example, if will to export a list of all entities and their thumbnail urls, how would I do that?

[Jim_McTiernan]

Are you using an entity feed file? Can you not extract the data from that file (i.e. you are providing that data to Target Recommendations in the first place)?

[iliketesting]

We are currently not using a feed file. We are passing it from the website (client-side) to Target.  

[Jim_McTiernan]

I believe there is a way but I need to verify the process. I will plan to post a reply here when I can, but not within this coffee break. Thanks.

[Jim_McTiernan]

So there is no productized or documented way to do this, sorry. It is possible to get at the data via a browser dev tools function workaround. You could use the Catalog Search function in Target to display the correct catalog entity data. Then in your browser open the Developer tools panel and select the network tab and refresh page. In the list of network requests you should see one starting with 'productSearch'. Right click on that request and open it in a new browser tab, that will display your search data in a json format. From there you would copy and paste into text editor or spreadsheet. Not ideal method of course but it is a way to access the entity data passed client-side.

[Rajneesh_Gautam_]

@Jim_McTiernan  - for Recommendations, would be great to have access to Target backend stats (number of views, carts, sales and so on) against entities (through Admin APIs) which drive recommendations algorithms. This will help:

1. technically for troubleshooting when we do see expected products being not being recommended or unexpected recommendations

2. commercially - using Social proofing stats like "this product sold X times"

[simochen]

Thanks for the recommendation Rajneesh. This would be a great feature request for our enhancement community posts - our product engineering and support teams are always trying to learn more about what developments to work on for future releases from our community members. If you submit your request here, other customers can also view your requests and upvote them for more visibility. You can submit an enhancement request here!

[Amelia_Waliany]

Hi @Jim_McTiernan , thanks so much for your time in the Target Community today! This question was posted by Target Community member, isolda:

"Through an array, we could get the info of 2 different A/B tests at the same time in the same url.

They had both the Audience as "All visitors".

Now, we are asked to try the same, but this time one of the tests has to be with a custom audience (Referred from another concrete url), whilst the other one maintains the All visitors audience. In this case, the dataLayer where we push the info of the two tests is not getting both info, but one of them in every refresh of the url.

We wonder if this is possible to achieve somehow, or we are just losing time?

Many thanks in advance."

Link to original question: Is it possible to run 2 tests at the same time with different audiences?

[Jim_McTiernan]

Not sure I understand your question completely, but you can run 2 different AB tests at the same time on the same URL by creating mutually exclusive tests. Please see: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/audiences/visitor-profiles/use-profile-scripts-...

[simochen]

Thank you for your question @isolda! It is possible to have an activity with two audiences for the same test, however the audiences must be mutually-exclusive. From our documentation about multiple experience audiences in A/B tests here, you'll see that if a visitor matches more than one audience (which in this case they would due to the "All Visitors" setting), then the content for each audience will be returned and will push down the visitor's relevant content. In this case, it would be helpful to choose two audiences that are exclusive from one another if you want to set up one single A/B test.

[DaveUA]

@Jim_McTiernan  Thanks for organizing this session. I've been trying to track down an answer with regard to content management and scalability as it pertains to personalization...

If using Adobe Target, are we able to hook up any content management system for automated content population and scalability? Or are we required to be on the adobe CMS to avoid manual uploads for campaign content? Thanks!

[Jim_McTiernan]

Adobe Target can work with 3rd party CMS solutions via the Remote Offers. Please see: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/experiences/offers/about-remote-offers.html?lan...