Use control groups

Welcome to Adobe Campaign Classic! By the end of this module, you should be able to use control groups in a campaign. A control group is a subpopulation that you exclude from your target, similar to what you do when you run an AP test. However, rather than sending them different versions of the campaign, we will actually exclude them from the campaign. The people in the control group will be marked in the delivery as having been excluded because they were in the control group. This concept allows you to compare the behavior of the people that received the delivery against the people in the control group who did not. Depending on the nature of your campaign, you might want to compare their buying behavior or registration or visits to the website, etc. This will allow you to identify and isolate campaign effects that were related to the campaign versus if there was a magazine ad running at the same time or if a link to your website was posted somewhere else, etc. Adobe Campaign lets you form this control group from the main target by taking a sample. The advantage of letting Adobe Campaign extract a control group is that it will be random and comparable to the target. If you have a predefined control group that you’ve been using already for your campaigns, you could use that as well. You can configure a list of people as the control group. Let’s now configure a new campaign. In the Campaigns tab, select Create a campaign. I will name my campaign Birthday Offer Campaign and select the program. Once we have our campaign labeled and associated with one of the programs, click OK. Then, let’s edit the campaign properties. To do this, click on the Edit tab and then on the Advanced Campaign Settings link, a new window shows up. Here we will navigate to the Control Population tab. We’re going to enable and edit control group configuration. Click on Edit. Then, I will activate random sampling. If you have a control group list already configured, you can set it from here. And I will use Size as a percentage to 10%. Now click Finish. Okay. And save the campaign. Now let’s move to targeting the new workflows. Rather than creating a new workflow, let’s override the default one. I will name it Birthday Offer Workflow. In our example, we will target the people who celebrate their offer today. So let’s do that and add a query activity. Let’s click on Edit Query and add a list of recipients who I know that have their birthday today. I can also preview the list. And once I’m happy, I will click Finish and OK. Now let’s drag and drop the email delivery. Double click to edit it. For the delivery template, I will select Birthday Email. And I will leave the label as it is. Click Continue. In here, you can preview or do other settings to your delivery. But for demo purposes, I will keep it as it is. Click Save. And then save the workflow. If I navigate to the dashboard, I will now see my delivery. Let’s go ahead and start our workflow. I can see that I have 44 results. Now I can move to dashboard and see that it needs approval. So let’s quickly do that. We have 44 targeted recipients and 31 to send. I will approve it. Now I will start the delivery and give it a couple minutes. I can see that my delivery has finished. So I can open the delivery. I can see a quick summary in here. I have 31 emails to send and 31 were processed. In the delivery section, I can see which people were part of the control group. And I can see that their status is ignored. So they were excluded from the delivery. Now if I click on the Audit tab, I can check the causes of exclusion. And I can see I have three people in the control group. And also in here, I have a short summary about how many people were included in the control group. Now let’s have a look at how you can identify the control group in your segmentation. You can set up a query and look for status of the delivery logs recipients equal to ignored as opposed to send or rejected. And control member equals to yes. Now you should be able to use control groups in a campaign. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you next time.