It has been a crazy week but I don’t have to tell any of you that.  Many of you might be new to working from home, adjusting to homeschooling (the biggest challenge in my house), changes to businesses, health issues, family concerns, etc…  We have never seen anything like this before.  Truly historical times.

Since last Saturday, I have been swamped helping some of my clients that leverage Adobe Target to make things easier and better for their digital consumers.  Now that I am getting my head above the water, I thought I would share some of the many use cases that have come up in the hopes that some of you might find them helpful as well.  

So, in no particular order:

A.  Geo-Targeting –   a few of the retailer companies that I work with wanted certain messaging sent to certain DMA’s and cities related to store closings, adjusted hours, etc..  I even had a few financial institutions that needed certain content displayed to their customers outside the United States.  Geo-Targeting is simply an Activity that is targeted to an audience that uses the built-in geo-attributes:

Another helpful utility built into the geo-attributes for the telco’s out there.  You can target your own network or a competitor’s network.  😉

 

 

B.  Impression Capping – This has been a popular request this week.  Present COVID-19 related content show but only for 3 or 4 impressions and then suppress it.  This is done by leveraging Adobe Target profile attributes.  We simply set up a profile script to increment with each Adobe Target server call (or mbox call for us old-timers) like the one below.

 

 

Then create an Audience like this and use it in the Activity.  This Audience here essentially represents 1, 2, or 3 page impressions assuming a global mbox (every page) deployment.  The fourth impression would kick the visitor out of the test and stop any content associated with it to stop showing.

 

C.  Recommendations – quite a bit of work here this week helping customers adjust the Criteria used in Recommendations being made across the site.  The first thing we focused on is the recency of data.  Baseball and soccer cleats were hot items up until this week so adjusting the “most viewed” or “top sellers” to a smaller window made a lot of sense. 

To modify this, within the Criteria, simply drag it all the way to the left and data window for product suggested will only come from data within the last 24 hours.  

The next thing we did was raise the inventory considerations given the high volume of some items being sold.  Again, within the Criteria, you can tell Adobe not to include a particular SKU or product in the Recommendations if the inventory of that product falls below a threshold.

D.  Auto-Allocate – this feature is available to all Adobe Target licenses and not limited to those that have Target Premium.  This feature is huge during short-term marketing initiatives (think cyber Monday, black Friday, etc…) but was really helpful this week.  By simply changing the default radio button to what I show below within the Targeting step of the Activity setup, Adobe Target will automatically shift traffic to the better performing experience.

If you have different messaging that you need to convey to your visitors and are unsure of what one would be the best, you can let your consumers tell you.  Be warned though, I have seen this thing kick some serious butt and shift traffic pretty quickly when confidence is detected.

 

E.  Emergency Backups – This one came as a bit of a surprise to me this week and something you all should think about.  I’ve been helping companies use technologies like Adobe Target since 2006 at Offermatica and I’ve been the pseudo backup for people hundreds of times I am sure but this week things got a bit more formal. 

This week I was incorporated into a very formal process with one of the large Financial firms that I help a lot with test execution and system integrations.  When the situation arose this week, this firm put together very formal processes in place in the event someone is unavailable to work or even get on a phone.  Quite impressive and a testament to the value of optimization and personalization. 

The tactical component of this exercise involved making some adjustments to Adobe Target workspaces (NOT to be confused with Analytics workspaces:) and Adobe Target Product Profiles (NOT the Profile attribute:).  

F:  Test Results – these are not normal times and visitor behavior, traffic volume, conversions are likely very atypical.  In most of the scenarios I dove into this week, the test results were not helpful even though this noise is distributed across all test experiences.  I’d spend more time on qualitative data and use that data, coupled with your testing solution, to help the digital consumer.  Deciding a test winner based off of this traffic, could potentially not be a winner when things normalize.  That said, it depends on what the test is – I had a Recommendation test related to the design that could be valid despite odd traffic.  We are just going to test it again later.    

I wish all of you and yours well and let us all continue to flatten the curve.