Traffic Allocation Questions

[#1]

Trying to understad how is the target code for traffic allocation supposed to work.  When traffic split gets to 100% will the tool ignore previous experience assignments and try to send "ALL VISITORS" to Experience B, even those who had been put in Experience A?

OUR PROBLEM:
activities started, for example, at 80% (Control A) / 20% (Treatment B) which moved to 50% (Control A) / 50% (Treatment B), then eventually became 0% (Control A) / 100% (Treatment B).

After we went to 100% (Treatment B), we still get users getting the Control A experience.

from what we gather this happens because previous visitors that were tagged as Control A continue to get that experience until the cookie expires.  We know we can't reset the cookie as well.

Is this how it is supposed to work?  If so, what is the best way to set up activities?  Trying to get a better understanding on best way to set up Target activities. 

1.  do we deactivate the activity and create a new one if we want to increase to 100%?  By doing this will the previous visitors cookie be removed and a new one set with the new activity?

2.  do we assign a AUDIENCE % and then split that?  For example:

          

Audience %age of visitors	Traffic Allocation % Split	Business wants to increase traffic allocation to 20/80. SO we increase the audience to 75% of all visitors (audience) will be split 20/80 for the traffic allocation.  That means 15% will get A and 60% will get B. 25% of the visitor traffic is untouched
75%	(A) 15% - (B) 60%

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi ,

If you manually change the % split to 100% for Experience B,  Visitors who had previously been allocated to A (Control)  will stay in their initially-assigned experiences.  The traffic change will impact new entrants only.

It is recommended that, if you want to change percentages or greatly affect the flow of people into each experience, you should create or copy a new activity. Otherwise, if you change the percentages on different experiences, it will take a few days for the data to normalize again if many purchasers are return visitors. For example, if your A/B test is split 50/50, and then you change the split to 80/20, for the first few days after that change, the results might look skewed. If the average time to conversion is high, meaning it takes someone several hours or even days to make a purchase, these delayed conversions can affect the reports. So, in that first experience where the number went from 50 to 80, and the average time to conversion is two days, only people from the 50% of the population are converting on the first day of the test, although today 80% of the population is entering the experience. This makes it look like the conversion rate plummeted, but it will normalize again after these 80% of people have the two days to convert.

If you specify the percentage of entrants you want to see each experience. The total for all experiences must equal 100% i.e. If 75 % ( say the number is 100) of Visitors Enters the Activity and you have to be allocated 80% (Control A) / 20% (Treatment B) or any other combination of percentage such that The total for all experiences must equal 100%. As you mentioned above you can have an A/B with A being  15 % and B being 60%

When you want to optimize your activity from the beginning and identify the winning experiences as quickly as possible. By serving high-performing experiences more often the overall activity performance is increased you can use Automated Traffic Allocation

Thanks & Regards

Parit Mittal