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Community Q&A Coffee Break, 6/7/23: AT Recommendations feature, w/ Adobe Target Experts Bill Ozinga, John Mosbaugh, Justin Patrick, and Eric Thibeault

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Administrator

6/5/23

Join us for the next Adobe Target Community Q&A Coffee Break! 

  Wednesday, June 7th from 8am -9am PT 

We'll be joined by Adobe Target experts: Bill Ozinga (@wozinga), John Mosbaugh (@jmosbau), Justin Patrick (@JSPatrick), and Eric Thibeault (), and extra support from Francisco Fraga (). In this AMA (Ask Me Anything)- like event, the experts will be logged in and ready to answer any of your questions related to the Target Recommendations feature.

Adobe Target Recommendations activities automatically display products, services, or content that might interest your visitors based on previous user activity, preferences, or other criteria. Target Recommendations helps direct visitors to relevant items they might otherwise not know about. Recommendations lets you provide your visitors with relevant content at the right time and in the right place. Learn more about Adobe Target Recommendations here.

Participating is easy:

  • Add your Questions below by Replying to this thread: 
  • Stand-by to watch the page as the experts weigh in during the hour, so that you can:
    • Clarify your questions
    • Ask follow up Qs and provide additional details
    • See Questions posted by other Community members to up-vote those that you find interesting
    • Discuss further with your Target Community member peers  

Meet the experts:

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Justin Patrick (@JSPatrick), Adobe Senior Business ConsultantJustin Patrick is a Senior Business Consultant with over 11 years experience in Target optimization and personalization strategies. He is a subject matter expert for Adobe Recommendations solution having supported dozens of implementations and custom deployments for his clients.

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Bill Ozinga (@wozinga), Adobe Senior Technical Account Manager: Bill Ozinga is a Senior Target Field Engineer with over 11 years experience in Target optimization and personalization strategies. As a previous client in the automotive field, he received two Webby Award nominations, beta tested Recommendations Classic, and was on the Customer Advisory Board.

Amelia_Waliany_2-1685986573556.jpeg

 

 

 

John Mosbaugh (@jmosbau), Adobe Principal Customer Success Architect: John Mosbaugh is a Principal Technical Consultant for the Adobe Experience Cloud with more than fifteen years experience working with Adobe Target and Recommendations. He has helped a wide range of clients in the retail, entertainment, and healthcare verticals implement and integrate Target in ways that maximize ROI. John is currently on the Information Architecture team assisting clients with DX solution integrations.

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Eric Thibeault (), Adobe Senior Technical Account Manager: Eric is a versatile technical leader combining a breadth of expertise with a deep understanding of business needs to generate leading-edge solutions supporting the corporate mission, while maximizing operational efficiency across organizations. With 15 years experience as a full stack web developer in e-commerce websites for Retail, Financial and Mass Media, and 7 years leading the optimization and personalization practice for a major national bank in Canada, Eric brings a wealth of contextual knowledge. He is also an excellent bilingual communicator (English/French) navigating between stakeholders of all functions to promote strategies, foster collaboration, and present complex concepts in an accessible language.

 

 Something already coming to mind?

Add your Adobe Target Recommendations-related questions below any time before or during the Coffee Break on Wednesday, June 7th, when you can watch the page and be ready to add follow-up questions and discuss further with other community members!

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Level 2

6/5/23

How do i broaden my recommendations catalog to include non-merchandising content like news stories or social media content?

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Hi, welcome. You can create a separate collection to sort out the different types of content, so you could have a Collection that holds products, and another that contains articles, and then you apply whichever one you need to a specific Recommendation. 

Make sure you have a good plan on how to separate them, it could be a flag passed in as an entity.parameter, or be based on the URL or some other piece of that is distinctly different between the two collections. 

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Level 1

6/6/23

Best practice input please

1. how do we form Target tests that leave authoring with the Content team (components only) and not driven by an entire page that's developed by devs (HTML&CSS)

 

2. How do we test individual components and report on the component not on the page level.

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Hi arehmeyer for #1 this sounds like Experience Fragments. You can create them in AEM and shared them out to Target then pull them in via the Visual Experience Composer. 

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Hi arenmeyer, can you clarify #2 a little? Are you talking about Target offer code or is this a reporting question?

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reporting please.

 

Ex: Our HP has 3 components we're testing. Could you please share the tagging methods that work best so we're able to track at the componment level.

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Hi arehmeyer

Assuming you're using Abode Analytics, you can build a script to send along the component name inside the Target Offer. 

 

Here is an example of tracking a user who clicks on a Recommendation component. 

 

 

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var recsClick = function(entityData) {
  if (typeof s !== 'undefined') {
    s.linkTrackVars = 'events,eVar3';
    s.linkTrackEvents = 'event7';
    s.events = 'event7';
 
    if (typeof entityData !== 'undefined') {
      s.eVar3 = entityData;
    }
 
    s.tl(this,'o','Target Recs Click');
  }
};
 
var targetRecEntities = document.querySelectorAll('[data-targetRecEntity]');
 
if (targetRecEntities) {
  targetRecEntities.forEach(function(link) {
    link.addEventListener('click', function(e) {
      recsClick(link.dataset.targetrecentity);
    });
  });
}
 

Hi @arehmeyer, if you don't have access to Analytics, you can try using Target Click tracking and Event tracking to get how a particular element performs.

 

1) Click Tracking: Tracks Clicks on any element as a success metric:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/activities/success-metrics/click-tracking.html?...

 

2) Event Tracking: This functions fires a request to report user actions (clicks and conversion):

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target-dev/developer/server-side/core-principles/event-track...

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target-dev/developer/client-side/at-js-implementation/functi...

 

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Employee

6/7/23

Welcome everyone. I'm Bill Ozinga, and am looking forward to answering your Recommendations questions this morning. 

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Employee

6/7/23

Hello everyone, I'm John Mosbaugh and I will also be answering your Recommendations questions today. 

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Yes, you have John, Justin and Bill standing by. You may want to refresh the page. 

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6/7/23

Hello everybody.  Eric here, happy to help you out with Recs questions.

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Employee

6/7/23

Hello, My name is Francisco Fraga and I am part of the support organization.

I am more than happy to answer your questions 

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Level 2

6/7/23

yes thanks! I refreshed the page

this is a pretty cool interface, though not exactly instant.

I can't seem to get the "thumbs up" feature to work on any of these comments

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@neerspinner thank you so much for this feedback! Indeed we are piloting this new interface for the Community Q&A Coffee Breaks and are ironing out the process - taking notes and making plans! Stay tuned for updates  and please feel free to DM me with any additional feedback on this interface! 

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Level 2

6/7/23

Are you related to the Ozinga family that does the concrete in the Chicagoland area?
i don't know them, but i know some people that went to school with them

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Not related, but I have one of their die-cast cement trucks and one of their baseball hats. 

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Community Advisor

6/7/23

Is there any way we can check  through API in which mboxEdgeHost a user profile resides?
Recently we came across an issue where if we access a user profile ("id": {        "thirdPartyId""404E6E64713525A58A05C121644C391F5.U1"    }  ) through delivery API from different edge host then the user profile gets lost. 
So wanted to ask how do we check in which edge host this is initially present so we hit the Profile Fetch API from the same edgeHost location.

 

Any info would be greatly helpful.

 

Thank you.

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Level 2

6/7/23

I'm brand new to PRs
do you have any general advice for how to approach the feature and find opportunities to service our merchandisers?

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Recs is definitely something that requires a fair amount of planning in the implementation process. I would suggest starting with a list of placements that you want to use, and make a list of what types of things you need to know to do what you want to accomplish as far as the business rules/logic. That list will often help you plan the type of data you need to collect to support that type of logic. (Showing only Gluten Free products would require indicating in the data which products are Gluten Free). 

Also take the template design you want to use and deconstruct that, so you know what pieces are required to make it dynamic to your requirements. You may need more than the basic "name, thumbnail, and URL" in order to do things like indicating sale prices, closeouts, etc. 

As far as the placements on the site, product detail pages tend to have the most impact, and then the shopping cart flow, and then the home page. 

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I'd also recommend investigating User Based Recs and Cart Based Recs, which leverage our AI capabilities. They work as a "multi-input" recommendation so we're basing it on multiple items instead of a single item. They allow you to do very personalized recommendations in any part of the site based on the user's behavior. 

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Community Advisor

6/7/23

hello @wozinga, @jmosbau, @JSPatrick@eric-thibeault, and frager1 - currently there is no way to access Recommendations database to troubleshoot whether the recommended entities are expected ones. Essentially we are looking for a way to query AT's Recommendations database to find the event count (views, carts, orders) against one or all entities. Is this on your roadmap?

Thanks for the question. There is an option at the Activity level to Download Recommendations data. This allows you to validate that the entities you are seeing are the correct entities based on collected behavioral data and your Criteria settings. This download does not contain event counts. This information is generally available within analytics. From our combines perspective, this is not currently on the product roadmap.

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Community Advisor

6/7/23

What are best practices for clicked element selection? I many time has faced elements not reflecting o/p metric when selected. 

Hello,

For o/p are you referring to on-page or something else?

Best practices for clicked element selection is to make sure you are using IDs on the specific element you want to track (example: <div id="myId">.  Target looks at the first ID it sees on the page. 

 

If the only ID is a near parent of your element, you should be good, but if the only html ID is far, you might have content at runtime that changes the html structure.  If this is happening, your tracking won't work. 

 

So best practice is to have an html ID on that specific element and you will avoid those potential issues.  An even better solution, if you have Adobe Analytics, is to leverage the a4t feature (Analytics for Target).

 

If you don't have access to a4t, you can change/force the "clicked an element" value.  For this, go in goals and settings, hit "edit" right to "clicked an element".  On the next page, hover over the "Selected Elements" option and hit the little pen icon.  There you will have the possibility to enter a more specific css string (example: if your element don't have an ID but have a unique class, you can change the field's value and only input your ".myClass" value there.

 

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Level 1

6/7/23

Would love to see some examples of Testing Roadmaps and Repositories of Learnings that you are using. 

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Hi @arehmeyer, thanks so much for joining us this morning for today's coffee break chat with the experts! In addition to the excellent resource that @jmosbaugh shared, please also find these webinars: 

  1. Zero to Hero: Starting and Scaling a Personalization Program

  2.  

    City National Bank Tool Kit: How to Achieve the Top 1% in Digital Optimization

 

Hope these are helpful!

 

Warmly,

Amelia

 

 

 

 

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Community Advisor

6/7/23

Hi @justinpatrick We could not use A4T due to no Analytics tracking placed on our Product Pages. We are using Adobe Target as reporting source for Recommendation Activities. 

We want to get the order data at productPurchasedId level. 

In Adobe Target reports, we get the consolidated data around number of orders, revenue , sales, can we get similar metric data against each productPurchasedId?

 

Thank you.

Hi @ambikaTewari_ATCI There is an option to Export Order Details to CSV in the Reporting section of your Activity.

Screenshot 2023-06-07 at 10.59.47 AM.png

Note that this option is not available for Recommendations activity type. However, it is available in AB and XT activities where you can use Recommendations as an offer.

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Event starts:

Jun 07, 2023 - 08:00 AM (PDT)

Event ends:

Jun 07, 2023 - 09:00 AM (PDT)

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