Adobe Target: Handle query strings in the URL

[#1]

Activity (Target Test) URL determines the page that will qualify and renders the experience for your Target Activity to the users. When prompted during activity creation, typing the complete URL always will not necessarily assure that the content will be delivered on that site page. In this post/blog, we will look at some options while setting up the activity with URL having query string.

We generally see the option to configure our activity URLs by clicking on ‘Configure’ icon, then select Page Delivery and then specify the URL. What if URL has query string? Will it work and show the personalized content?

In this scenario irrespective of your Targeted audience, one must have the template rule in addition to the base URL which will define your query parameters. There could be number of options to do that. Few of which have been explained below.

Option 1: Replicating the URL and keep it in the template rule with ‘contains’ option. This will reassure you that in any case, this URL will qualify for the test. But there are corner cases attached to it that can influence your reports data with the additional records to all those URLs which contains the base URL.

Option 2: Restrict the URL contains condition with only query string. The corner case discussed in point number one will be applied in this option as well but here the conditional setup is limited to only query string.

Option 3: This third option is something that Target tool provides w.r.t query parameters. Instead of targeting the complete URL, you can leverage the specific part of URL. Using the template rule with Query option eases your way to achieve the objective.

Note: In all the above options, the base URL remains same including the query string. Let’s say you want to personalize your content through VEC so it is very important to keep an eye on the base URL since this is the one URL which will be loaded in VEC for you.

Thanks!

[#2]

Quick question on this: Do you know if special characters are recognized and necessary for the query string targeting? So using the above as an example, you have query 'type=Summers%20Offers' but if someone comes to the site with 'type=Summers20Offers', would they still qualify?