Understand Visitor Profile Lifetime

[danieli22263765]

Hey all,

So I'm trying to wrap my head around the profile lifetime (set to 14 days by default), in another thread Adobe target visitor profile expiration - A/B test results​ a response from @mikewebguy who is Adobe staff says "If visitor cookie expiration is set to default 14 days on day 15 the visitor cookie is expired and the visitor is considered new and has the ability to re-qualify into whatever activity experience just like they did on day 1".

What I don't understand is no cookie that is set by Adobe expires in 14 days (see image below), I was then told that if a client is using the Visitor ID service then target uses the AMCV cookie that has a 2 year expiry therefore regardless of what the profile lifetime is set in target the profile expiry will actually be 2 years.

Could someone please clear this up for me, and if it is the case that the profile does expire in 14 days (unless changed), could you please highlight to me the cookie / session storage that is used to do this?

Many thanks

Dan

[MihneaD]

danieli22263765​

The storage mechanism for visitor expiration is a cookie. Requesting others to chime in with any additional technical details they know of. Here is official documentation that you can reference in regards to the default visitor expiration being 14 days for Target visitors and how you can request to have that increased to a max of 90 days by support: Visitor profile lifetime

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

[danieli22263765 · Accepted solution]

Hey Mike,

Thanks for the response, I have looked over the documentation and it all makes sense apart from Target doesn't drop a cookie that expires in 14 days (our implementation is using the default setting). Also I set up a fake test and visited it after 20 days and I was still bucketed into the same experience and all my profile attributes didn't expire.

I suppose what I need to see for closure (I know this is sad :-)) is how target is setting this 14 days, like I previously mentioned it's not in a cookie I can find.

Thanks

Daniel

[Ryan_Roberts_]

Hey danieli22263765​,

You are correct that the Target mbox cookie isn't set to expire after 14 days. However, the cookie expiration is only part of the whole. The key expiration is the Target server hosted profile for the id in the cookie. That is what expires after 14 days. It also is more accurately stated as 14 days of inactivity. Each time a request is sent for your id the expiration is set to 14 days from then. So if you keep hitting a page with Target on it every day your profile would effectively never expire. Only after 14 days without activity does it expire. Finally, 14 days of inactivity is the default setting and suitable for most situation but this can be changed if needed by reaching out to client care.

[danieli22263765]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the info, so can this be found using dev tools, say for example I had just changed from 14 days to 90 days how would I check this was working correctly?

Thanks

Dan

[Ryan_Roberts_]

Hey Daniel,

Only way I know to confirm this is via the confirmation from Client Care. I don't know of any dev tools that expose that information unfortunately.

-Ryan