During December's session of Ask the Community Experts - Adobe Target New Features, we had some questions around the topics covered. Here is a recap of those questions with the answers.
Topics Covered:
Watch Meeting Recording:
Watch the session recording here.
Question 1: How is Customer Attributes different than the capabilities Audience Manager customers currently use with Target/Marketing Could?
Answer: While Audience Manager can receive data to perform audience identification, it cannot perform analytics functionality that ties attributes to historical behavioral data or provide the reporting, analysis, and segmentation capabilities that are available in Adobe Analytics. The Profiles & Audiences core service enables rich data from across solutions to be tied together and associated with a single ID for use across the Marketing Cloud.
In Adobe Target, customer attributes appear as individual attributes that can be combined with other rules to build audiences. Audiences shared in the Profiles & Audiences core service are full audiences that cannot be modified. Customer Attributes can be loaded via a direct UI upload or over FTP and also exist as rich data sets instead of Boolean traits. Customer Attributes can send over a value like “profile.age=22” - a dynamic value. Segments shared from Audience manager or the Marketing Cloud are Boolean (True or False) so you could pass over “age 22 = true” or “age 22=false” but you’d have to make many audiences to capture ages. The dynamic ranging of the Customer Attributes makes them highly valuable for personalization.
Question 2: How do I work with Customer Attributes if I only have Adobe Target? Where do I load the file?
Answer: You need to get it provisioned. It is available within Adobe Marketing Cloud UI as a core service. It appears as Customer Attributes, but you also need to be added to the user group by a Marketing Cloud Admin after the functionality is provisioned. The group is also “Customer Attributes”.
Question 3: Is Adobe Target different from Adobe Test & Target?
Answer: Adobe Target is more like the next generation Target. It has almost all the features of Test and Target but with a better, easy to use user friendly UI. “Test&Target” is now referred to as Target Classic in the UI and Help.
Question 4: Guided optimization: what are minimum traffic requirements and/or time for guided optimization tests to determine the winner?
Answer: The min time is one hour and fifteen orders per experience to start automatically allocating traffic. To determine a winner, look at the reports and look for steady conversion rates and lift and confidence intervals to determine a winner.
Question 5: Will auto allocate interefere with segments created by audience manager?
Answer: No, it won’t. Segments are still used in auto-allocate activities for activity entry and reporting.
Question 6: Can the at.js file be loaded assynchronously?
Answer: It can be. Keep an eye on the release notes for more.
Question 7: Can we simply replace mbox.js with AT.js in February when it's available? And will this also be required if we want to integrate Target with Analytics?
Answer: Yes, you can replace it with mbox.js when it is available. It is not required for Target with Analytics.
Question 8: How will at.js work with third-party API calls, e.g. Demandbase?
Answer: AT.JS will allow you to do even more flexibile integrations because the mbox calls are all real-time asynchrounous and don't use document.write anywhere. Additionally there are callback functions mechanims and the ability to set a per-mbox timeout. This way you can elect to not block 3rd party calls ahead of time for a fully async experience (though of course, always be aware of user experience and flicker)
Question 9: What changes to we need to make to our AEM cloud-configuration (and is there a minimum version of AEM we need to use) to support AT?
Answer: It will need to be 6.1+. AEM 6.0 and before uses a custom mbox.js file and leverages mbox factories
Question 10: Is it possible to merge audiences via Target to create a new audience?
Answer: This functionality is coming to the tool and will be announced soon after the holidays!
Question 11: Can you create a section within the target interface where you can build a - library of test templates - pre configured with success metrics.. etc..
Answer: With the A4T integration you do not need to set up Segments or Success Metrics in the Target tool! You can leverage your reporting in the Analytics UI and configure it yourself. You can currently create a Tempalte yourself (that’s really just an activity that you copy when creating a new one) that then gets copied over if you are using Target as a data source. I definitely suggest checking out A4T though!
Question 12: What are the advantages of integrating AEM and Target? Any documentation will also help.
Answer: Here are some documents to read: https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/author/personalization/ct-touch.html One core advantage is using AEM hosted content so you can control markup, style guidelines, etc.
Question 13: Is there a best practice on time to run an auto-allocate -- a.k.a. 2 weeks ?
Answer: Looking for stability, so no set time. You can view results at any time to get a clear understanding of what is going on.
Question 14: Is Auto-Allocate to Best Exp same as Automated Personalization?
Answer: Auto-Allocate selects the best experience based on overall traffic and sends that experience to new visitors. It does not look at profile information and does not re-evaluate the same user on future visits.
Question 15: Is there a reporting interface? I loved the old target reporting interface.. the new one just send me to Adobe Analytics & most of the time it says access denied...
Answer: Your campaigns must be set up to use A4T (the Target and Analytics integration) The reporting interfaces in A4T Campaigns are available in Target Standard and Premium but not Target Classic. Consider moving to the new UI. You also will need username/password in Analytics to view these reports.
Question 16: Has the neew ST library been integrated with DP Debugger, mboxProfile/Trace and cnamed Target domains?
Answer: Yes. It has been.
Question 17: Does AT.js require being on visitor ID?
Answer: No but we do recommend all customers to move to Visitor ID for the other benefits.
Question 18: Does removing mboxFactory support eliminate the mboxTrack click-tracking capabilities created by Adobe Consulting? If so, what are teh alternatives?
Answer: Click tracking is being built in as a native functionality of the file. This will all be in the documentation.
Question 19: If we migrate do we need to redo all the integration? do we have documentation on them? how easy or difficult it is?
Answer: If talking about migrating to at.js, then no work is required. The existing mbox calls on the site still work. Older page-based integrations are not supported.
Question 20: Can we be on the at.js beta before February?
Answer: No, unfortunately it’s too late to join the beta.
Question 21: Does an upgrade to AT.js mean that there will be no Target Classic integration with Analytics? And in such a case the only data integration between Target and Analytics will happen in Target Standard/Premium and not at all in Classic?
Answer: Target Classic supports A4T integrations. There are no reports there, you have to use Reports & Analytics for viewing reports.
Question 22: Is the implementation for A4T same (VisitorAPI.js, App_Measurement.js, mbox.js) still work same with AT.js?
Answer: Yes, the implementation is the same except at.js replaces mbox.js.
Question 23: Is the only difference between user and profile parameters that user parameters is set using Profile Scripts and profile parameters is set on mbox calls? They both obey the time-to-life customizable by client care, and both are customer scoped parameters?
Answer: Yes, that is the only difference.
Question 24: Question about API - does it work with VCE campaigns now?
Answer: No, activity create APIs only work with form-based creation flow.
Question 25: If host groups can be selected in January will that mean we can setup or manage host groups in Target Standard/Premium instead of Target Classic UI?
Answer: No, managing host groups still must be done in the Classic UI. The capability will move to Standard/Premium later in 2016.
