Target key concepts
Information about key concepts that help you understand the features and capabilities of Adobe Target.
Activities and Tests
An activity determines the experiences a site visitor might encounter.
For example, you might design an activity that tests two different landing pages, one that highlights information about women’s summer shoes, and one that highlights more general summer apparel. The activity determines the conditions that control when each of these landing pages appears, and the metrics that determine which page is more successful. The activity is configured to start and end when specific conditions are met. These conditions can include starting and ending the activity between specific dates or to start when the activity is approved and to end when it is deactivated.
Plan carefully when designing an activity. Determine when the activity starts and how long it lasts. Then, list your offers and assign a target audience to each one.
Target includes several activity types. The following table provides an overview of each activity type with links to help you learn more. To help you better choose the best activity type for your purposes, the Target team has also created the Adobe Target Activities Guide.
Note: You can now include recommendations inside A/B Test activities. This functionality requires that you have a Target Premium license.
Note: You can now include recommendations inside Auto-Allocate activities. This functionality requires that you have a Target Premium license.
Note: You can now include recommendations inside Auto-Target activities. This functionality requires that you have a Target Premium license.
Note: You can now include recommendations inside Experience Targeting activities. This functionality requires that you have a Target Premium license.
For example, you might want to encourage people who purchase a backpack to consider buying hiking shoes and trekking poles. You could create a recommendation that shows items that are often purchased together, using the “People who bought this also bought that” algorithm. Or, you might want to encourage visitors to spend more time on your media site by recommending similar video to the one they are watching, using the “People who viewed this viewed that” algorithm.
Note: You can now include recommendations inside A/B Test (including Auto-Allocate and Auto-Target) and Experience Targeting (XT) activities. See Recommendations as an offer.
Locations
Primarily, a location is a page on your website. It could also refer to a place in a mobile app, an email, or any other place where you run an optimization.
Locations are essential to activities and experiences. You decide whether any location can do one, both, or none of the following:
- Display and swap content for visitors.
- Log visitor behavior.
In Target Standard, a location can be any element on a page, as long as the page contains a single line of code that enables Target in the <head> section of each page you want to track. This line of code calls the JavaScript libraries needed to collect information and deliver targeted experiences to your visitors.
Locations are combined with audiences to provide an almost endless number of options for targeting information to your customers. For example, if a visitor has never been to the site before, you might display a discount coupon for new customers. Likewise, the page might be changed to display offers that are more optimized to returning customers.
You can also use locations to track a visitor’s progress through your Web site. You can also use locations track whether the visitor completes a specific success metric, such as adding an item to the shopping cart or completing a purchase.
Experiences and Page Designs
An experience, sometimes called a recipe, defines the content that displays on your page, and other page elements, such as links.
An experience determines which offer displays in a certain location when specific targeting conditions are met. For example, the experience determines that, when a return visitor visits your site, an offer for two-day shipping displays at the top of the page. The experience also determines that, when a first-time visitor views the page, a 10% discount appears in the same location.
An experience consists of the offers, image assets, or other HTML elements (such as links) that appear on the page to help drive the visitor toward the result you desire. Target combines locations, offers, and experiences to determine which content displays on your site during a specific test.
An experience can also be a different page design. For example, one experience might have one set of links across the top of the page, where another experience has different links or the same links arranged in a different order. You might want to test whether one image provides more lift than another, or whether an ad is more likely to be clicked near the top of your page or in a different location.
Target optimizes experiences for each of your visitors across your digital touchpoints and to test different experiences to determine which will be most successful. By carefully planned targeting of experiences, you can make sure that your site visitors see the most relevant offers in the right locations on your page, improving your chances of a successful visit.
