Control group in Adobe Target EXT

[RavikiranPaturi]

Hello , 

I have been working on a personalization use case, for which the audience groups are segmented and shared from audience manager. This was a site level personalization where in the audiences are divided into 5 audience segments. There has been a request to include a 20% control group who are exposed only to default experiences on the website. Any suggestions on how i can create an audience that is only 20% of the entire visitors of the website?? 

[MihneaD · Accepted solution]

@RavikiranPaturi 

It seems what you want is the functionality of both A/B's ability to direct traffic based on % and XT's ability to direct traffic based on the audience. Currently, there isn't an activity type that will do this. (People of the forum correct me if I've missed something) The correct thing to do would be to work with a developer and build a custom audience bases on visitor identifiers etc. That will take time and resources. However, I'm trying to think creatively for you. I think you will be able to accomplish your goal by setting up an additional audience that is identical for both and then only allow 20% of the visitors to enter the A/B test so it would look something like this:

Activity1:
Audience0 --> 20% -> ExpA (Control)

Activity2:
Audience0 + Audience1 --> ExpA
Audience0 + Audience2 --> ExpB
Audience0 + Audience3 --> ExpC
Audience0 + Audience4 --> ExpD
Audience0 + Audience5 --> ExpE

Have a look at the screen-shots below:
A/B Activity:

X/T Activity: 

Mihnea Docea | Technical Support Consultant | Customer Experience | Adobe | 1 (800) 497-0335

[RavikiranPaturi]

@MihneaD

[RavikiranPaturi]

@MihneaD - thank you so much for your insight, I did try to use MCID to create an audience group that consisted of people with mcid ending with (0,1) out of all visitors with the anticipation that the mcid is allocated to the site visitors sequentially with the ending digit ranging from 0-9. Turns out that mcid allocation is rather random. But thanks for the idea, i will reach out to my development team to see if they can write any scripts to control group audience.

[richardlee]

@MihneaD any reason why you wouldnt setup a normal A/B test and have each of the 5 segments setup as an experience audience and 20% allocated to A (control)?

[MihneaD]

@richardlee I would typically do it that way. However I was answering this specific question based on the parameters he had provided. Note: "I have been working on a personalization use case, for which the audience groups are segmented and shared from audience manager. This was a site level personalization where in the audiences are divided into 5 audience segments."