Activities

Activities in Adobe Target let you personalize content to specific audiences and test page designs.

For example, you might design an activity that tests two different landing pages, one that highlights information about women’s summer shoes, and another landing page 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, such as between specific dates, or to start when the activity is approved and to end when it is deactivated.

When designing an activity, you should plan carefully. Determine when the activity starts and how long it lasts. Then, list your offers and assign a target audience to each one.

Activities list section_DE8E2DB30D534962A931EF8BB48240F5

The Activities list is the default view when you open Target. You can create activities from this page and manage existing activities.

You can also display the Activities list by clicking the Activities tab at the top of the Target UI.

Activities list

The Activities list provides an overview of all activities and lets you perform various actions:

Element
Description
Left-navigation rail
Switch between your saved or live activities and failed or draft activities.

Show filters icon

Show Filters icon

Access filters by clicking the Show Filters icon near the top of the list.

For more information, see Apply filters to the Activities list below.

Search box
Quickly find an activity or reduce the number of activities displayed in the Activity list. You can search by Name, URL, or ID.
Create Activity

Create an activity. For more information about creating the various activity types, see:

For more information about each type, see Activity types below.

Create mobile preview link

More actions menu

Use mobile preview links to perform easy end-to-end QA for mobile app activities.

Click the More options icon (the vertical ellipsis), select the Create Mobile Preview Link, then choose the activities you want to test on mobile.

Customize Table

Customize Table icon

Change which columns display in the Activity list by clicking the Customize Table icon on the upper right side of the table, then selecting or deselecting the desired columns.

The changes are applied to your account and remain active even after you log out of Target.

Bulk operations checkboxes

Perform bulk operations on all activities or on selected activities.

For a list of actions that are available (depending on your permissions and the activity status), see Perform quick actions below.

Type

The activity type. The Type column lets you quickly identify each activity by type.

  • AB-M: manual A/B Test
  • AB-AA: Auto-Allocate
  • AB-AT: Auto-Target
  • AP: Automated Personalization
  • XT: Experience Targeting
  • MVT: Multivariate Test
  • REC: Recommendations

For more information about each type, see Activity types below.

Name

The name of the activity. Click an activity name to display that activity’s Overview page.

Click the Quick Info icon next to each activity name to view more information about that activity in a pop-up card.

Click the More actions icon (the horizontal ellipsis) next to each activity name to open a menu that lets you perform quick actions on an activity. The following actions are available (depending on your permissions and the activity status): Edit, Activate, Deactivate, Copy, Delete, and Archive. For more information about each action, see Perform quick actions below.

Click the table header to sort the list alphabetically in ascending or descending order by name.

Status

The status of the activity can be one of the following:

  • Live: The activity is currently running.
  • Draft: The activity setup has started but the activity is in draft mode and is not yet ready to run.
  • Scheduled: The activity is ready to be activated when the specified start date and time arrives.
  • Inactive: The activity has been paused or deactivated.
  • Syncing: The activity has been saved and is being synced to the Target delivery network.
  • Ended: The specified end date and time of the activity have been reached and the activity is no longer being served.
  • Archived: The activity has been archived. You can activate an archived activity to use it again.

Note: When you perform certain actions, such as activating an activity outside of the Target UI using API methods, the update can take up to ten minutes to propagate to the Target UI.

Last Updated

The date and time when the activity was last updated, and by whom.

Click the table header to sort the list in ascending or descending order by date.

Priority

The priority of the activity.

The priority is used if multiple activities are assigned to the same location with the same audience. If two or more activities are assigned to the location, the activity with the highest priority displays.

Depending on your settings, the Target UI and options for Priority vary. You can use the legacy settings of Low, Medium, or High, or you can enable fine-grained priorities from 0 to 999.

Property

Shows the property for the activity.

Enterprise user permissions is a Target Premium feature.

Estimated Lift in Revenue

Shows the predicted increase in revenue if 100% of the audience sees the winning experience.

Calculated using the following formula:

(<winning experience> - <control experience>)*<total number of visitors>

This number is rounded to one decimal place, maximum, if the condensed form has only a single digit before the decimal. For example: $1.6M, $60K, $900, $8.5K, $205K

This column shows “—” for activities that do not have enough data to call a winner show or do not have a cost estimate.

See Estimating Lift in Revenue for more information.

Source
Shows where the activity was created: Adobe Target, Adobe Target API, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, or Adobe Mobile Services.
Location

The URL for the activity identifies where the activity is displayed. This column helps you quickly identify an activity and determine whether a particular page already has an activity running on it.

If an activity runs on multiple URLs, a link shows how many more URLs are used. Click the link to view the complete list of URLs for that activity.

You can search based on URL. Use the drop-down list next to search box and select URL.

Author
The name of the person who created the activity.
Decisioning Method
The decisioning method used in each activity: Server-Side or Client-Side.

Activity types types

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, we have also created the Adobe Target Activities Guide.

Activity Type
Description
A/B Test
A/B testing compares two or more versions of your website content to see which version best improves your conversions during a pre-specified test period.
Auto-Allocate
Auto-Allocate, a type of A/B test, identifies a winner among two or more experiences and automatically reallocates more traffic to the winner to increase conversions while the test continues to run and learn.

Auto-Target

Target Premium

Auto-Target, a type of A/B test, uses advanced machine learning to identify multiple high performing marketer-defined experiences, and serves the most tailored experience to each visitor based on the individual customer’s profile and the behavior of previous visitors with similar profiles, to personalize content and drive conversions.
Multivariate Test
Multivariate Testing (MVT) compares combinations of offers in elements on a page to determine which combination performs the best for a specific audience, and identifies which element most impacts the activity’s success.
Experience Targeting
Experience Targeting (XT) delivers content to a specific audience based on a set of marketer-defined rules and criteria.

Automated Personalization

Target Premium

Automated Personalization (AP) combines offers or messages, and uses advanced machine learning to match different variations to each visitor based on their individual customer profile, to personalize content and drive conversions.

Recommendations

Target Premium

A recommendation determines how a product is suggested to a website visitor, depending on that visitor’s activities on the site.

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 videos to the video they are watching, using the “People who viewed this viewed that” algorithm.

NOTE: You can also include recommendations inside A/B Test, Auto-Allocate, Auto-Target, and Experience Targeting (XT) activities. For more information, see Recommendations as an offer. This functionality requires that you have a Target Premium license.

Apply filters to the Activities list filters

Access filters by clicking the Show Filters icon near the top of the list.

Filter options

The menu lets you filter activities by the following attributes:

Attribute
Details
Type
Filter by activity type.
Status
Filter by activity status.
Reporting Source

Filter by reporting source.

  • Analytics: Display activities that use Analytics for Target (A4T) as the reporting source.
  • Target: Display activities that use Target as the reporting source.
Experience Composer

Filter by which experience composer was used during activity creation:

  • Visual: Displays activities that were created using the Visual Experience Composer (VEC).
  • Form Based: Display activities that were created using the Form-Based Experience Composer.
Metrics Type

Filter by which success metric was chosen during activity creation.

  • Conversion
  • Revenue
  • Engagement
Decisioning Method

Filter by the decisioning method used in each activity

  • Server-Side: Display activities that use server-side decisioning.
  • Client-Side: Display activities that use client-side decisioning.
Activity Source

Filter by the activity source used to create each activity.

Property
Filter by the property in which the activity was created.

Perform quick actions quick-actions

Click the More actions icon (the horizontal ellipsis) next to each activity name to open a menu that lets you perform quick actions on an activity.

Quick actions options

The following actions are available (depending on your permissions and the activity status):

Action
Description
Edit

Change the activity. Any activity can be edited.

For more information about the various ways you can edit activities, see Edit an activity or save as draft.

Deactivate

Stop a live or scheduled activity. A deactivated activity can be reactivated or archived.

If you deactivate or archive an activity and then later reactivate it, a visitor will continue being a part of that activity after the reactivation if they were in it before it was deactivated or archived. Any conversion metrics recorded during the time between the two events won’t be attributed to that activity.

Activate
Start an inactive activity or an activity that is ready to be activated.
Archive

Send the activity to the archive. By default, archived activities no longer appear in the Activities list. Change the filter for the activities list to include archived activities to see them. You can activate an archived activity to use it again.

If you deactivate or archive an activity and then later reactivate it, a visitor will continue being a part of that activity after the reactivation if they were in that activity before it was deactivated or archived. Any conversion metrics recorded during the time between the two events won’t be attributed to that activity.

Copy

Copy an activity. Any activity can be copied. Copying an activity creates a new activity with the same name, appended with “Copy.” For example, a test called “Browser Offers” is copied to “Browser Offers Copy.”

Visual offers are copied with the activity. You can safely edit the offers in the copy without impacting the original activity. The only exception is saved offers and images in the Content/Assets folder.

Delete

Delete a draft or activity.

NOTE: Deleted activities cannot be recovered. Unless you are sure that you’ll never need this activity again, use the Archive action. You can then reactivate the activity if necessary.

Considerations

Note the following details about the Activity list:

  • Archived and ended activities do not appear in the Activities list. To view these activities, filter them using the Filters icon at the top of the list.

  • When an activity originally created in Target Classic is deactivated or deleted, it is deleted from Target Standard/Premium. Deleted activities originally created in Target Classic are not sent to the Archive folder in Target Standard/Premium. The archived folder functionality applies only to activities created in Target Standard/Premium.

  • All activity types other than Automated Personalization (AP), Auto-Allocate, and Auto-Target give you the choice to use either Target or Adobe Analytics as the data source. AP, Auto-Allocate, and Auto-Target always use Target data.

  • Activities are available to several channels:

    • Web and mobile sites
    • Internet-connected screens and devices, including kiosks and ATMs
    • Email and other acquisition channels or partner sites
    • Mobile apps
    • Anywhere else you can deliver tagged content

Limitations section_049D4684403A4E07B998067EB8E9BE56

Each Target activity has the following content limitations:

Item
Limit
Unique selectors
300 if a selector is repeated in a different experience, it is counted once. However, if it is repeated in the same experience, it is counted again.
Offers in each experience
350
Click track selectors in metrics
50
Mboxes in metrics
50
Audiences and locations
50 audiences and locations (mbox) combinations should not be more than 50.

The activity cannot be saved if you exceed any of these limits.

Increasing the numbers of these items in your activity also increases the length of time that it takes to synchronize the activity across Target.

For additional limits of the Visual Experience Composer VEC, see Visual Experience Composer Limitations.

Attributes imported into Target for activities updated outside of Target section_802B0D174E6A44E1A96F404CA81AAE44

If activities created in Target are updated from outside of Target (for example, via API), the following activity attributes are imported back into Target: thirdpartyId, startDate, endDate, status, priority, and marketingCloudMetadata(remoteModifiedBy).

This import job runs when the activities page is opened, with a maximum delay of ten minutes.

Training videos section_BE80D13A2E81460C885F902010E1AD87

The following video contains more information about the concepts discussed in this article.

Activity Types (9:03)

This video explains the activity types available in Target Standard/Premium.

  • Describe the types of activities included in Adobe Target
  • Select the appropriate activity type to achieve your goals
  • Describe the three-step guided workflow that applies to all activity types
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