Manage exclusions

Last update: February 4, 2025

Topics:
Automated Personalization

Manage exclusions by creating exclusion groups, excluding duplicate offers, excluding specific experiences, and excluding default content in Automated Personalization (AP) activities in Adobe Target.

Create exclusion groups

Create exclusion groups in Automated Personalization (AP) activities to ensure that experiences with the designated offers are automatically excluded.

Exclusion groups are a great way to ensure that incompatible offers are not presented in the same experience in different locations. For example, suppose you have two offers: one is for a 20% discount for all merchandise and the other is for a 15% discount. You never want these two offers to be presented to visitors in the same experience. If you add these two offers to an exclusion group, you can ensure that this situation is never the case.

You can also limit which audiences can see specific offers in AP activities. For more information, see Target Automated Personalization offers.

To create an exclusion group:

While creating or editing an AP activity, click the Manage Content icon ( ).

The Manage Content dialog box displays.
Click the Experiences tab.
In the Manage Content dialog box, click Exclusion Groups.

If you have previously created exclusion groups, they display in the list. If you have not yet created an exclusion group, you are prompted to create one.
Click Create Exclusion Group.
(Required) Specify a descriptive name for the exclusion group.

A descriptive name helps you or others quickly locate and understand a group’s purpose.
Locate and select the desired offers that you want to add to the exclusion group.

You can select multiple offers from the same location in an exclusion group.
Click Save.

The offers in the exclusion group are automatically excluded from the same experiences going forward.

Exclude duplicate offers

Prevent offers from the offer library from being duplicated when used in different locations in Automated Personalization activities.

You might have an activity, for example, with six locations on a page with 12 offers. There is a chance that the same offer could be placed in one or more locations in the activity. This feature prevents duplicate offers from displaying at the same time in different locations within the same activity.

Click the Configure gear option > Duplicate Offers, then click Allow Duplicates or Disallow Duplicates.

Duplicate offers options

Exclude specific experiences

Exclude specific experiences if you want to exclude certain offer combinations from your Automated Personalization activity.

There might be certain combinations that don’t work together, or you might be limiting the number of experiences tested to decrease traffic requirements for your activity.

While creating or editing an AP activity, click Manage Content in the header bar.

The Experiences list shows each experience generated from the permutations of all content and location options.
Exclude experiences, as desired.

You can exclude specific experiences by hovering over the desired experience and then clicking the exclude icon.

Or you can batch exclude experiences by selecting the checkbox for the relevant experiences and then clicking the Exclude icon in the top-right corner of the dialog box. The Exclude icon displays when one or more experiences are checked.

You can filter this list view to see only excluded or only included activities by clicking the Status drop-down list.

The experiences are now excluded from the activity and their Status show as Excluded.

Exclude default content

Sometimes, you might not want to include your default content as part of your Automated Personalization activity. How you access this setting is different from creating exclusion groups. You can use this method to have only one offer (different from your default content) in a location as part of your AP activity.

Excluding default content is a great way to change the look and feel of the rest of the page to suit the offers you are testing with your AP activity. For example, suppose you want to match the color palette of the offers you are testing, you could change the background color of your page and exclude the default background color.

To exclude default content using the Visual Experience Composer (VEC):

While creating or editing an AP activity, select the content you want to replace and click to access Change Text/HTML, Change Image, or Change Background Color.
In the dialog box, create your new content and uncheck Include to the right of the default content (or uncheck the Default Image/Video in the Select Content screen).

Depending on the content or offer type, the Include checkbox is in a slightly different place.

For Text/HTML content:

For Image/Video content:

For background color:
Click Save.

You can see the experiences created from the offers you specified under Manage Content. You notice that no experiences are created in Manage Content using the default offer you excluded.

To exclude default content using the Form-Based Experience Composer:

While creating or editing an AP activity, click Change Text/HTML or Change Image Offer under Content.
In the dialog box, create your new content and uncheck Include to the right of the default content (or uncheck the Default Image/Video in the Select Content screen).

Depending on the content or offer type, the Include checkbox is in a slightly different place.

For Text/HTML content:

For Image/Video content:
Click Save.

You can see the experiences created from the offers you specified under Manage Content. You notice that no experiences are created in Manage Content using the default offer you excluded.

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