AEM integration with Adobe Target: Automated Personalization

What is Automated Personalization?

Automated Personalization (AP) provides advanced machine learning algorithms to drive personalized experiences and improved conversion rates for digital experiences.

You will be using the Visual Experience Composer (VEC) to add your offers to the Activity.

The setup of an AP Activity is very similar to that of an A/B test with one key difference. Rather than having a Menu for your different experiences, you make all your changes on a single “experience”. You have the option of testing multiple versions of each area of the page that you change.  The key here is that this works similarly to a Multivariate test, as each possible combination of changes will be tested. Therefore, AP is usually best run on pages with significant traffic.

Scenario 

In the below article, we will setup an AP Activity on AEM website in which we will add some alternate hero banner and further change the "Text" of the Left Hand Nav Bar on a single “experience”.AP will try to optimize the Experience content by showing it to visitors who may be more likely to convert on that content and testing all the possible combination of changes . We will further apply offer level targeting to each individual offer so that the content only displays for a particular Audience.let’s say we have multiple levels of customer loyalty (Gold, Platinum), and we have content within this AP Activity that should only be shown to visitors when they belong to a particular Audience. 

Prerequisites:

1. AEM Instances

2. Adobe Marketing Cloud login

Let’s Get Started

AEM

1.  Start The AEM Instance (Double Click the JAR file)

2. Login to the instance

User: - admin

Password: - admin

3.  Setting Up of DTM cloud Service

Open the AEM Navigation by clicking on the solution title, switch to “Tools” and navigate to “Deployment -> Cloud Services” as shown below. Add Configuration.

Title: - AEM_TARGET

Name: - aem_target

Click Create after selecting DTM configuration.

4. DTM Settings Dialog will come up, if it does not comes up, click Edit:

Wait here, now we will setup DTM.

DTM

1.  (Login to “marketing.adobe.com” -> Select Activation-> launch it )

2.  Click “Add Property” to add a property:

Add

Name: - AEM_TARGET                                           

URL: - http://localhost:4502/content/geometrixx-outdoors

Then ,Click create Property and then at home page you will see this property added. Click it to configure it.

3.  For Integrating AEM with DTM it is a pre-requisite to know your DTM account API-token and the API key is only visible to Adobe employees. To Retrieve API token for your Account see-

https://helpx.adobe.com/dtm/kb/How_to_retrieve_API_token_for_DTM_account.html

AEM Configuring Again

AEM’s Step 4 continue

4. Add API Taken and select the appropriate DTM company & property & click to connect DTM and validate if AEM able to connect it to DTM or not.

Note: Make sure Include Production Code on Author is unchecked

Go to Staging Tab:-

Uncheck the use self-hosting and add the staging header and footer script saved from DTM.

Do this for Production Tab also

5.  Setting up of DTM on “Geometrixx-outdoors”.

Go to sites, Select “Geometrixx-outdoors” -> Select English -> Men’s->Edit Properties.

Configuration Reference: - AEM_TARGET

Adobe Target

1.      Login to “marketing.adobe.com” -> Select Target -> launch it

2.      Go to Setup tab-> Implementation -> Edit mbox.js Settings ->Client Code

Save this for later use

3.      Go to “AEM_TARGET” property in DTM

Overview Tab-> Add Tool

Click Create tool.

Adobe Target Setting Page would get opened, click Save Changes.

Congratulations Target Is configured

Enabling mixed content

After launching Target, you will land directly on the Activity listing page. We will need to first enable mixed content in the browser in order to set up our first Activity. Follow the instructions for your specific browser according to the screenshot below. In a future release of Adobe Target, this step will no longer be necessary

1. Create AP Activtiy

   1.1 From the Target Premium Activities list, click: Create Activity " Automated Personalization"

  1.2 In the field labeled “Enter Activity URL”  for your website like below and your site will load within the VEC.

  1.3  Click anywhere within the page to begin setting up the Activity’s experiences.

  1.4  First we will be adding some alternate hero banners to the Activity. Click on the hero banner (the main banner image going across the page) and select “Change Image”, the image offer library will open.

  NOTE: To select a different image from the content Library using "Change image" option , it is required to have an Adobe Scene7 Publishing System account.The images available for change include the images uploaded to the Marketing Cloud assets folder or uploaded in the content Library in Target For more information on Integrating Adobe Target with Scene7, Please see https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/target/ov/t_scene7_settings.html

  1.5 Select the alternate versions of the hero banner by clicking on the images that you would like to include in your activity.

NOTE: Target gives you option here to include your site’s default content as part of the Activity. In this scenario, the default content will be served from your Activity as if it was any other offer. AP will try to optimize the default content by showing it to visitors who may be more likely to convert on the default content. If you wish to include the default hero banner as part of the Activity then leave that selected as well. If the default hero banner should be excluded, then clicking on it will unselect it and it will be removed from the Activity.

1.6   After you have selected the alternate hero banners, Click the “Save” button to return to the VEC.

1.7   Scroll to Left Navigation on the page. Select the “Change Text/HTML” option.

 1.8  Modify the text from the editor.

 1.9  Click “Add Text/HTML offer” to add more variants/offers to this location of the Activity.

1.10  After creating several options of altered text, click the “Save Button”.

Add offer Level Targeting

Offer level targeting can be applied to each individual offer so that the content only displays for a particular Audience. An example of a use case where a marketer would apply offer level targeting, let’s say you have multiple levels of customer loyalty (Gold, Platinum), and you have content within this AP Activity that should only be shown to visitors when they belong to a particular Audience.  Offer level targeting allows you to do just that.

Add Targeting Rules to an Audience

1. Click the “Content” option to pull up the “Manage Content” window

2. Select the offers that you would like to apply the targeting rules to

In this example, we are selecting two of the offers to be served only when visitors have a “Gold Status”. However, there are many different Targeting options that can be applied to meet your specific use cases.

3. Click the “Targeting” option

4. Select an Audience from the list

For example, we have selected “Gold Status” from the below list. Only visitors who have a customer level status of Gold will see the offers that have this targeting applied. Feel free to create your own audience here as well using the “+ Create Audience” option.

5.   Click “Save” to apply the targeting.
Your content list should now look similar to the shown screenshot.

6.  We can also target offers to customers who have a customer level status of Platinum. Select a couple of offers, click the “Targeting” option again, and select “Platinum Status” from the list. Then, click “Save”. Now only customers who have a customer level of Platinum will see these offers.

7.  Now click “Done” to return to the VEC main page.

8.  Once you are ready, click the “Next” button to move on to the next step.

Target your Activity and Select the Activity’s Algorithm

It’s time to configure the targeting and select your algorithm that will be used for this AP Activity.

First we will be adding an Audience to the Activity. In the previous step, we selected an Audience at the individual offer level. In this step, we will be adding an Audience at the Activity level.  At this level of targeting, we are deciding who should be allowed into the campaign. Whereas with the offer level targeting from the previous step, we were deciding what pieces of content should be displayed to particular Audiences once those Audiences were entered in the campaign.

Add Activity Targeting

1. Click the down arrow icon next to the “All Visitors” text and select “Change Audience” to open the Audience list.

2. From the Audience list, click “+ Create Audience” to create a new Audience

3.  Specify a name of your choosing for your new Audience.

4. Click the “Add Rule” option to begin configuring your new Audience

5. There are many targeting options to choose from. 

6. Once you have finished configuring your new Audience, click the “Save” button to save it. This will take you back to the Audience list. From the Audience list, select your new Audience, and click the “Save” button & this will apply to audience in the activities

Select the machine learning algorithm

In this step, you will also be selecting the machine learning algorithm to be used for the Activity. There are three different algorithms to choose from.  Please refer to the below table for a breakdown of each.

For reference: The Algorithm named Residual Variance is the same Algorithm used in Classic 1:1, an earlier version of the Target user interface. This was the first Algorithm available in Target. With Target Premium, there are two additional Algorithms to choose from.

7. In the center of the page you will see the Algorithm selection option. By default, the Random Forest Algorithm is selected. For this lab, feel free to select the Algorithm that best fits your needs by clicking on the gear icon and subsequently clicking one of the three Algorithms.

8. Once you have selected the Algorithm for this Activity, click “Next”.

Tip: It takes time for the machine learning to build a model for each offer/reporting group. During this time, the system learns from the behavior of the control group, where offers are served at random to a percentage of the total population.   The time it takes for the models to be built is dependent on the level of traffic and the number of conversions. In the AP Offer level report, you can see if a model has been built yet.  Highlighted below you will see either a clock icon or a checkmark.  The clock icon denotes more time is needed, whereas the checkmark means the model has been built for that particular offer/reporting group.

Activity Goals & Settings

The last step is selecting your Primary Goal metric. This is particularly important for AP Activities, as the algorithm optimizes to this type of conversion. You can still add additional metrics as well, but the algorithm will adjust traffic based on each variation’s performance against this primary metric.  Therefore, it is important to choose carefully and select the metric that is most suitable for the campaign. If you are unsure about which primary metric is right for the activity, optimizing towards click through rate is a good place to start.

Set your Activity's primary metric/optimizing goal

1. Scroll down the page until you see the section for Reporting Settings. It should look something like the below screenshot:

Advanced tip: There are two types of optimizing goals, Conversion and Revenue.

Conversion – With this metric there are three options. You can track clicks, but you can also track if a particular page was viewed or if a particular mbox request is made.

Revenue – With this metric there are two options. You can optimize against either Revenue per Visitor (RPV) or Average Order Value (AOV). A use case for optimizing towards revenue would be if your conversion rates are on the lower side.

2. For this demo, choose Conversion as your primary metric

3. Next we will define the conversion event. Select “Clicked an element” and then click on the “Select elements” button. This will take you back into the VEC to define your click event(s).

4.  Click on the Lefthand Nav to select it. After clicking on it, you should see the banner will have a blue border around it.

5.  Once you have selected the Lefthand Nav, click on the checkmark seen on the very top right corner of the page. This will take you back to the Goals and Setting page.

6. Lastly, let’s give this Activity a name. Found in the very top left of the page, click on the “Untitled Activity” text and specify a name. Please use your lab participant number in the name of your Activity.

7. Now we are ready to save the Activity. Click the “Save” button located in the top-right corner of the page.

Synching & Activating

On the top left of the Overview page, you will see a spinning “synching” notice on the top left of the screen for a few moments. At this point, the test is synching with the Target delivery network

Once an activity is synched it will be inactive and the Blue “Activate” button will appear on the top right.

Preview links

Before launching your test, you might wish to have your QA team review your test experiences.

8. Click the “View Experience URLs” link to open the Experience URLs overlay.

9. To generate the preview links, click the blue “Generate all” text link

These URLs will allow you to jump directly to a test experience:

Tip: to share or socialize these links, you can copy and paste the links into an email or document.

10.   After your test experiences have passed review, you are ready to Activate your test. Simply click the “Activate” button.

11.   Click “Activities” from the main menu to go back to the Activities list and confirm that your activity is Live.

Congratulations! You have delivered a personalized experience with Adobe Target! 

For any further questions around AEM, DTM & Adobe Target, Please visit Adobe Experience Cloud Communites