[AT Community Q&A Coffee Break] 5/27: Shannon Hamilton, Senior Adobe Target Product Manager

[Amelia_Waliany]

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

taking place Wednesday, May 27th @ 10am PDT

--> REGISTER NOW <-- 

We'll be joined by Shannon Hamilton aka @ShannonHamiltonPM, Senior Adobe Target Product Manager, 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 her areas of expertise:

• Adobe Target user interface,
• A/B Testing and Experience Targeting (XT)
• Offers libraries, Activity lists, Audiences libraries
• Integrations: i.e. Adobe Analytics (A4T), Adobe Experience Manager Experience Fragments, Audience Manager audiences, and Adobe Experience Platform integrations

Want us to send you a calendar invitation so you don’t forget? Register now to receive a reminder!

A NOTE FROM NEXT WEEK'S COMMUNITY Q&A COFFEE BREAK EXPERT, SHANNON HAMILTON 

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 @ShannonHamiltonPM
• When exchanging messages with Shannon 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 Shannon

 

Shannon supports the end-to-end marketer UI, as well as Target’s authoring APIs and cross Adobe Experience Cloud integrations. Her mandate includes developing Target's integration with AEP's Unified Profile. Previously, she was responsible for the machine learning / AI capabilities within Target, including ML-based personalization and ML-enhanced testing. Shannon holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she specialized in data science and marketing.

Curious about what an Adobe Target Community Q&A Coffee Break looks like? Check out the thread from our first break with Kimen Warner, Director of Adobe Target Product Manage...

[Jason_Hickey]

Hi, @CJara1  - Most use cases are likely solved through the Audience Library - especially now that we've added the ability to combine multiple audiences and build out AND/OR/NOT logic inside of your audiences or audience combinations.  Profile Scripts are great for when you need to do mathematical operations, simple programming loops, or just need access to raw code to tweak your audience to do exactly what you want!  Some examples there are building out affinity scores based on page engagement, or counting certain interactions in the Target profile.  

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@CJara1 wrote:

Hi Shannon,

Do you recommend using Audience Library segments over profile scripts for Target? How do you decide which to use?

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[CJara1]

Thanks, Jason.

What's the best method to debug an Audience Library segment? Is there a way to debug it live or through the AEC debugger?

[Jason_Hickey]

Hi @CJara1  - mboxTrace is probably your best bet!  It will show you your profile snapshot before and after the call to Adobe Target, and show you any missing audience qualifications when you are evaluating any activity.  Here is a link to documentation on mboxTrace: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/activities/troubleshoot-activities/content-troub...

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@CJara1 wrote:

Thanks, Jason.

What's the best method to debug an Audience Library segment? Is there a way to debug it live or through the AEC debugger?

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[CJara1]

Forgot about mbox trace. Great suggestion, thanks!

[aseemp97838257]

A little confused with the below feedback from Adobe - we want to present Geo specific  content on our AEM pages but the below says to use Target

ADOBE'S RECOMMENDATION:

If you have purchased Adobe Target and are able to create activities within Target we DO NOT recommend using AEM to build those activities.  Building targeted activities directly within AEM will most definitely lead to performance degradation on the instance because of the JS required to render the targeted content.  This will occur even if you have implemented redirects on your pages.  The instance may not be noticeably impacted at first, but over time after continuous targeted content authoring, performance degradation is inevitable.

The issue with the above is the logistics of doing Geo AND Tests on same pages

[ShannonHamiltonPM]

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@aseemp97838257 wrote:

A little confused with the below feedback from Adobe - we want to present Geo specific  content on our AEM pages but the below says to use Target

ADOBE'S RECOMMENDATION:

If you have purchased Adobe Target and are able to create activities within Target we DO NOT recommend using AEM to build those activities.  Building targeted activities directly within AEM will most definitely lead to performance degradation on the instance because of the JS required to render the targeted content.  This will occur even if you have implemented redirects on your pages.  The instance may not be noticeably impacted at first, but over time after continuous targeted content authoring, performance degradation is inevitable.

The issue with the above is the logistics of doing Geo AND Tests on same pages

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Generally, we recommend using Target directly instead of via AEM where possible. You can combine tests and having different geo versions directly within your Target A/B activity. Both your needs would be covered in your activity by having different versions of each experience that have a geo-based audience associated with them. See: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/activities/abtest/create/target-experience-to-mu...

[aseemp97838257]

Thx Shannon,

So how do we do this for 100's of Markets?   Setting it up and managing in Target would be a challenge - is there a table lookup option for target?

Thoughts

thx

Aseem

[Jason_Hickey]

@aseemp97838257 I often think of this as an 80/20 rule or a long tail strategy.  For the markets and pages that you want to actively optimize and balance that optimization against specific KPIs with statistical backing - use Adobe Target.  Simultaneously you may have a long tail of pages that are lower volume, not actively managed, or don't need to track experiences against goals or outcomes you are specifically looking to improve and have math to back it up.  In those circumstances, it is likely that the native capabilities inside of Experience Manager Sites would support your use case!  Ultimately it is personal to your business needs, resourcing, team structure, and overall strategy.  Hope that helps!

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@aseemp97838257 wrote:

Thx Shannon,

So how do we do this for 100's of Markets?   Setting it up and managing in Target would be a challenge - is there a table lookup option for target?

Thoughts

thx

Aseem

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[scott_c]

@ShannonHamiltonPM - Our company is fairly new to target.  Can you help with some use cases you've seen for using the scripting functionality in target?

[jonathanl557422]

Hi. For A4T, are there plans to include the Target conversions in analytics when the Target activity's goal has been configured as clicking a specific element (element has not been tagged in analytics)? Selecting to view the Target activity in analytics in this instance just shows the qualified traffic metrics and not the conversion.

Edit: I stand corrected. The conversions are available in analytics. Lift and confidence are still not.

[ShannonHamiltonPM]

Hi Jonathan,

We don't have a plan for passing in the clicked an element data to Analytics at the moment. I would recommend you post about it in the "ideas" section of the community so others can vote on it. I (and the rest of the PM team) review the community frequently for the top requests. 

We are expanding A4T support with allowing for lift and confidence in Analysis workspace, which will be helpful.  

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@jonathanl557422 wrote:

Hi. For A4T, are there plans to include the Target conversions in analytics when the Target activity's goal has been configured as clicking a specific element (element has not been tagged in analytics)? Selecting to view the Target activity in analytics in this instance just shows the qualified traffic metrics and not the conversion.

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[aseemp97838257]

Is there a way to create multiple (more than 3) experiences on the SAME url with only querystring differences?   Note the Querystring is not always in the same location.

[julian_sam]

@ShannonHamiltonPM

When will A4T be enabled for Auto-Target and AP Campaigns to perform further analysis in Adobe Analytics?

[Jason_Hickey]

@julian_sam - A4T is being enhanced for both Auto-Allocate and Auto-Target throughout our June and summer releases.  Additionally, we are bringing A4T lift and confidence in to Analysis Workspace across the same time period!   Automated Personalization will continue to use Adobe Target as the data source for personalization.   

As we have the release dates established, check out our pre-release notes here to stay informed!

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@julian_sam wrote:

@ShannonHamiltonPM

When will A4T be enabled for Auto-Target and AP Campaigns to perform further analysis in Adobe Analytics?

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[ShannonHamiltonPM]

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@julian_sam wrote:

@ShannonHamiltonPM

When will A4T be enabled for Auto-Target and AP Campaigns to perform further analysis in Adobe Analytics?

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Hi Julian,

We are excited that A4T will be available for Auto Target later this year! Auto-allocate will also get A4T support. Automated Personalization activities are not currently on the roadmap to be supported. 

[Sath]

Hi Shannon,

Thank you for this initiative. Am new to Adobe target, are there a detailed documentation on how to interpret the metrics data that we collect in Adobe Target.

[ShannonHamiltonPM]

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@Sath wrote:

Hi Shannon,

Thank you for this initiative. Am new to Adobe target, are there a detailed documentation on how to interpret the metrics data that we collect in Adobe Target.

---

Hi Sath,

Welcome to the Target community! We have robust reporting depending on which activity type you are using.

Here is the overall topic:   https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/reports/reports.html

Here is a helpful article on conversion and confidence: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/reports/conversion-rate.html

Here is an article with reporting FAQs: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/target/using/reports/reporting-frequently-asked-questions.htm...

[nicholasr284932]

Hey Shannon,

 I've recently re-implemented target and went from my old multiple mboxes setup (global,home,pdp, etc) to a single global mbox as recommended by the adobe documentation. What are the advantages of the single global mbox? It feels like it just made page template targeting slightly more complex. Also, how long will Target still support the old multiple mboxes setup?

Thanks for your time today!

[Jason_Hickey]

Great question @nicolasr2843930 - we fully support the legacy setup and in fact continue to support it in the latest Experience Platform SDK (alloy.js) which unifies data collection for all Experience Cloud applications.  You can learn more about that release here: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/platform-learn/tutorials/data-ingestion/web-sdk/introduction-...

Generally we find that one service call to Adobe is preferable than multiple calls, even if those calls are asynchronous.  The chief benefit of a single Adobe call for Adobe Target is that you can batch all of your experiments and personalization acitivites together with a call and response per page (or even pre-fetch actions with our AT.JS 2.0 branch for Single Page Apps) which greatly improves your performance and allows for experience changes to be fetched from a visitor's local memory, not our servers.   It also allows you to deploy rapidly on new properties and have a "global" reach for any part of any page. 

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@nicholasr284932 wrote:

Hey Shannon,

 I've recently re-implemented target and went from my old multiple mboxes setup (global,home,pdp, etc) to a single global mbox as recommended by the adobe documentation. What are the advantages of the single global mbox? It feels like it just made page template targeting slightly more complex. Also, how long will Target still support the old multiple mboxes setup?

Thanks for your time today!

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[ShannonHamiltonPM]

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@nicholasr284932 wrote:

Hey Shannon,

 I've recently re-implemented target and went from my old multiple mboxes setup (global,home,pdp, etc) to a single global mbox as recommended by the adobe documentation. What are the advantages of the single global mbox? It feels like it just made page template targeting slightly more complex. Also, how long will Target still support the old multiple mboxes setup?

Thanks for your time today!

---

Hi Nicolas,

We don't have plans to retire regional mboxes given they are important for Single Page App (SPA) sites. We are however sunsetting mbox.js, so I hope you implemented at.js  

The global mbox can help with prioritization of activities and reduces Target  implementation complexity if you update/ change your default site. 

Here are some additional documentation pages to help you out: 

https://docs.adobe.com/help/en/target/using/implement-target/client-side/faq-at-js/global-mbox-frequ...

https://docs.adobe.com/help/en/target/using/implement-target/client-side/mbox-implement/global-mbox/...

[Nicolas_Swisscom]

What are some best practises of using AI/ML in the Media Industry (daily Newspaper). Any examples around propensity scoring + Adobe Target?