Set a control group
A control group is a sub-population excluded from the delivery. You can define a control group to avoid sending messages to a portion of your audience and compare post-delivery behavior with the main target. This option helps measure the impact of your campaign.
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Enable control group
To add a control group, enable the option when defining the audience of your delivery. The control group can be extracted randomly from the main target or selected from a specific population. Consequently, there are two main ways to define a control group:
- Extract a number of profiles from the main target.
- Exclude some profiles from a list or based on criteria defined in a query.
You can combine both methods when defining a control group.
All profiles included in the control group at the delivery preparation step are removed from the main target. They do not receive the message.
CAUTIONTo add a control group to a delivery, activate the Enable control group toggle from the Audience section of the delivery creation screen.
Extract from target
Build a control group
To define a control group, choose to extract, randomly or based on a sorting, a percentage or a fixed number of profiles from the target population. If adding an extra population, choose the No extraction option and select the extra population as detailed here.
First, define how the profiles are extracted from the target: randomly or based on a sorting.
Under the Control group section, choose an Extraction mode:
- Random: When preparing the delivery, Adobe Campaign randomly extracts a number of profiles corresponding to the percentage or the maximum number set as the size limit.
- Ranked by attribute(s): This option excludes a set of profiles based on specific attributes in a specific sorting order.
Then, use the Size limit section to set the number of profiles to extract from the main target. It can be a raw number (for example, 50 profiles to exclude) or a percentage of your initial audience (for example, 5% of the main target).
Sample of control group
For example, to create a control group with the 100 youngest profiles, follow these steps:
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Select the Age field as a sorting criterion. Leave the Ascending sort option.
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Add the Creation Date field. Change to the Descending sort option.
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Define 100 as the threshold in the Size limit section.
These 100 youngest profiles are then excluded from the main target.
Check your control group
View the logs to check and identify the excluded profiles. For example, consider a random exclusion of five profiles.
After the delivery preparation, review how the exclusions were applied:
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In the delivery dashboard, before sending, check the To exclude KPI.
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In the delivery logs, the Logs tab shows the exclusion step.
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The Exclusion causes tab displays the number of excluded profiles for each typology rule.
For more information on delivery logs, refer to this section.
Add an extra population
Another way to define a control group is to select a specific population in an existing audience or define a query.
From the Extra population section of the Control Group definition screen, click the Select Audience button.
- To use an existing audience, click Select audience. Learn more in this section.
- To define a new query, select Create your own and define the exclusion criteria using the query modeler. Learn more in this section.
The profiles included in the audience or matching the result of the query are excluded from the delivery target. They do not receive any message.