Interpreting Target trace

[canadero]

We have a campaign that isn't firing correctly.  It consists of a single variant for a single audience, yet is inconsistently displayed for that audience.  When I pull a trace however I'm getting both matched and unmatched Segment / TargetIDs:

    "evaluatedCampaignTargets": [
        {
          "campaignId": 146062,
          "campaignName": "Activated member message",
          "campaignType": "landing",
          "matchedSegmentIds": [
            1293296
          ],
          "unmatchedSegmentIds": [
            1294171
          ],
          "matchedTargetIds": [
            2744369,
            2744370
          ],
          "unmatchedTargetIds": [
            2731156
          ]
        },
...
]

I'm struggling to interpret this data.  I can open the "audiences" menu in Target and by inspecting the DOM see some but not all of the audiences above.  Can someone explain how I can pinpoint which Segment and Target IDs are which?  Additionally, while I understand "SegmentIds" as mapping to audiences, what does "TargetIds" represent?  Is this pointing to content?

Thanks!

[krishnashism588]

Hi, this indeed is tricky. You need to visit the 'People' tab from the 9-dot-matrix you would find on the top black band. In that portal, when you click on the audience segment you expect to qualify as, in the URL you would find the segment ID for that audience. 

Not sure about what matchedTargetID is, never used it in debugging. 

Basically issues could be of 2 types majorly - 1) campaign qualification, and 2) javascript syntax/compatibility error between the offer code and the library version that the page has, and some times with the browser version as well. 

I use the above method to check for the first possibility, and then move to the second.  

[canadero]

Okay, but there doesn't seem to be any way to look up an audience in "People" by ID, and the value in the URL doesn't match the value in the trace for the audience I do know. Is there a lookup function?

[krishnashism588]

@canadero- you may follow the below steps instead, which was initially suggested by Shelly-

Log into the UI and navigate to the Audience List

Open chrome's network tab

Filter by json

Click on the 'info' icon You'll see a request like - https://davidson.experiencecloud.adobe.com/content/mac/davidson/target/audiences/chrome_audience.at....

Copy the JSON and paste it to JSON Lint or any beautifier tool Match the targetID with the one in mbox trace

[shelly-goel · Accepted solution]

SegmentIds are either from the reusable segments library (search in Audience Manager Segments or People Core Services) or anonymous ones created for the particular campaign

TargetIds are the pre-built audiences in the Target Library or anonymous targets for any segments from campaign

Reference here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/activities/troubleshoot-activities/content-trou...

There's a possibility of other activities getting qualified as well for the same location/ mbox or js error resulting in a discrepancy. You can turn ON console logging to find what's wrong from the Tools tab in the debugger. It would display the errors (like js errors, if any) in the console. Adobe Cloud Debugger might give more details around the activity/ segments qualification.

[canadero]

Hmm... I may be missing something. Can you clarify what's meant by targets/audiences vs segments? I understand a segment to be a subset of visitors, but not clear on what a "target" is in this case.

[krishnashism588]

@canadero - the words audience/segments are used often interchangeably. There could be only 2 types of segments based on their usage and it is also possible that the same segment is sometime used as a 'target audiences' and sometime used as a 'reporting audience'. This is different from the concept of segments as we use in Analytics. Within Target world, segments are ideally defined at a 'Visitor' level, if they are imported from outside Target. If it is built in Target, then by default it is set at Visitor level.

[kirill_techZone]

For sake of acuracy I would say that the word "segment" usually used in Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics. The word 'audience' is used in Adobe Target.

[kirill_techZone]

I used Adobe.IO Integration API for downloading list of all existing audiences and then searched for Audience IDs in JSON response. This is challenging in terms of because each time I need to generate a JWT (JSON Web Token). This is boring + it gives CRUD access which can be damaging if misused by mistake. I wonder why Adobe can't create specific UI for this purposes, specifically for audience+segments search by IDs, or at least show audience IDs in the activity's "Targeting" section?

For me after all I found in this thread it is still a mistery what targetId is. Documentation tells that this is "The IDs of targets", then "target expression library", then "anonymous targets". What does "target" mean ? Documentation page doesn't have hypertext links leading to other pages describing this, so I still dont know what those terms mean.

[mysticDeveloper]

Yeah this is terrible. 

If one wants to QA what audiences they are bucketed in or not, they will have to tinker with the API instead of adobe simply having the ID actually available in the UI

[kirill_techZone]

In the provided link the documentation tells: "The IDs of targets, either from the target expression library or anonymous targets for any segments from campaign."

Could someone give clarifications here:

"IDs of targets" - what is "target" here ?

"target expression library" - what is this and where I can read more about it ?

"anonymous target" - Is it anonymous audience ?

"campaign" - does this word "campaign" mean "adobe target activity" here ?