Refine targets by excluding query results

Transcript

Welcome to Adobe Campaign. In this video, you will learn to apply standard exclusions and create a predefined filter. Additionally, you will also learn how to troubleshoot a workflow by examining its logs. To start, we first need to understand what an exclusion activity is. An exclusion activity is used to remove selected query activity results from the results of one main query that identifies your target population. The exclusion queries identify people you don’t want to target. For example, you may want to exclude profiles that have been blocklisted or that have opted out of email communication. In this example, the main query is targeting profiles that are 21 years of age or older, and there are about 16,000 results. We want to exclude any profiles with empty email addresses from this population. 2,000 profiles in this target don’t have an email address, so the final target population is 14,000. Businesses typically abide by marketing best practices and have a standard definition of who they want to exclude from their target population, such as a blocklisted profiles. In Campaign, these types of business rules are managed using typology rules and they are applied just prior to the delivery being sent. Profiles that shouldn’t be targeted based on these rules will be excluded from the final send list. However, as a best practice, we will want to exclude these profiles up front in the targeting of our workflow. This will provide us with a more accurate estimate of the population that will be targeted in the delivery. In Campaign, filters allow you to apply these types of business rules within your queries. Campaign comes out of the box with predefined filters that we can use for our filtering conditions, such as blocklisted email addresses. Additionally, we can define our own filters and save them to reuse in other workflows. We’ll begin by applying standard exclusions within a Campaign workflow. In this example, I’m going to continue building a workflow that was started in a previous module. Our goal is to add a query that excludes recipients that do not have an email address in their profile as well as blocklisted recipients. Let’s start by creating a predefined filter for profiles with an empty email address. In the Explorer tab, select Profiles and Targets, followed by selecting Predefined Filters from the drop-down. On the right, select the new icon to open the Application Filter popover. Next, rename the label. To the right of the label, we can see the document type is Recipients, which means we are filtering on the Recipients table. As a best practice, let’s change the internal name as well. Next, select the Expressions field, followed by selecting the Edit Expression button. The Select and Expression window appears. We want to double-click Email. Next, select the Operator column, then select the Is Empty operator from the drop-down menu. Once complete, we can check if we’re getting the correct results. Select Preview, and the recipient list populates. We want to add an additional field next to the recipients, the Email field. To add the Email field, right-click in the list and select Configure List. Next, within the available fields, double-click on Email to add it to the column list. Once complete, we’re able to see that the recipients do not have email addresses, so the filter is working correctly. Don’t forget to save our changes. Next, let’s navigate to the workflow. In the Explorer tab, under Campaign Management, select Campaigns, followed by selecting the marketing campaign our workflow is located in. The dashboard for our campaign appears. Next, select the Targeting and Workflows tab, and select the workflow you wish to use. In this example, the CJR Apparel Sale for Men workflow is being used. We have already created a main query, and we’re going to add a third query by dragging and dropping another query to the workflow. We can edit the query by double-clicking on it and selecting Edit Query in the window that appears. Next, let’s add the target selection by double-clicking Filtering Conditions and set the Predefined Filter. In the Filter window, next to the Add button is a drop-down menu. Within the menu, hover over Predefined Filter and the filter we created earlier is populated in the list. Select our Email is empty filter. Since this is a filtering condition that will likely be used for multiple campaigns, it really saves a lot of time since we do not need to recreate it each time we want to use it within a campaign. Now let’s add the Block List filtering by following the same steps we used to select our Email is empty filter. We can select the out-of-the-box Block Listed Email Address filter. Next, let’s change the operator to the left of the Expression column to OR. Be careful as this is different from the operator column. We’re using OR here because we want to identify every profile that does not have an email or is block listed. Once complete, save the workflow. Next, let’s add an exclusion to the workflow. I can drop it over from the palette to our workflow and attach it to the union as well as attach it to the new query. At this point, we can try starting our workflow. The exclusion block has begun to flash red indicating that an error has occurred. There are a few ways we can investigate this error. The first way is to right-click on the exclusion and select Display Logs. This shows us the log messages related to the selected activity, so in this case the exclusion. But we don’t want to troubleshoot just yet. Let’s look at another option to view the logs. At the bottom of the console, select the Journal tab. This shows us the log messages for the whole workflow, not just the field activity. Select Edit and we’re back on the workflow. At the top of the workflow is an option to display the tasks and logs. When we select that and then select the Journal tab, we get a list of all the messages for the workflow, but with the additional option to filter them. In our workflow window, select the activity with the error and the journal displays the messages just for the activity we selected. Selecting anywhere in the workflow, not on an activity, repopulates the whole list again. There are three types of information we want to be aware of. The first one with a red icon is an error. The ones with the blue callout bubble with an eye in it are just information, and the yellow callouts with the eye are warnings. Now we are ready to explore our error. Select Exclusions in the workflow and look at the message column. It says you must define the main set of exclusions. This error is indicating that we didn’t set the primary set. So in the exclusion, we must say which incoming set is the main target population that the other set will be excluded from. Now that we know the problem, let’s close the workflow logs and modify the exclusion. Double click on the exclusion activity and then from the primary set drop down, select Union, our main target population. Now let’s look at another way of validating results while we are executing. First right click on the exclusions and select Enable but do not exclude and restart the workflow. What happens is the workflow executes all the way to the exclusion activity, but does not execute the exclusion activity itself. It’s paused before it. This option allows us to view the results that are coming from these transitions of the activities that are leading up to the exclusion activity. When we right click on one of the transitions and select Display the target, the results coming from the query are displayed. If we want to check the results, we can configure the list by right clicking and selecting Configure List. Let’s add the fields that we should be checking. In this example, we will want to see the email addresses. We would also like to see if the block list attributes are correct. For this, select No longer contact by email. Once complete, we can see in the No longer contact results column that the profiles have a value of Yes to be no longer contacted which is correct. Next let’s validate the email addresses. We can do this by sorting the email column. We can see that there are recipients that do not have email addresses even though they have a value of No on the block list. Because they don’t have emails, they are added to this list. Remember our expression was either one or the other and our results so far looked correct. Now let’s finish executing the workflow. To do that, we need to set the exclusion activity back to normal execution. However, we do not want to restart the workflow from the beginning, but I would like to move to the next activity from where we are. To do that, right click on exclusion and select normal execution from the drop down. Once we’ve done that, we will need to save the workflow so it picks up the last change we made. Once it’s saved, we can just start the workflow and it will complete by executing the exclusion activity. We can see that we have 6456 recipients that will be targeted and that this number is less than the target population. This means that some results have been excluded from the main list. As a best practice, let’s stop the workflow once complete. You should now know how to apply standard exclusions, create a predefined filter, and how to troubleshoot a workflow by examining its logs. Thanks for watching.