Set a control group 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 you measure the impact of your campaign.
➡️ Discover this feature in video
Enable control group add-a-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 and/or selected from a specific population. Consequently, there are two main ways you can 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 being part of the control group at the delivery preparation step are removed from the main target. They do not receive the message.
To 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 extract-target
Build a control group build-extract-target
To define a control group, you can choose to extract, randomly or based on a sorting, a percentage or a fixed number of profiles from the target population. If you prefer adding an extra-population, choose the No extraction option and select the extra population as detailed here.
First, define the way 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 to the maximum number that is set as the size limit.
-
Ranked by attribute(s): this option enables you to exclude a set of profiles based on specific attribute(s) in a specific sorting order(s).
Then use the Size limit section to set the number of profiles that you need 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 control-group-sample
For example, to create a control group with the 100 new youngest recipients, follow these steps:
-
Select the Age field as a sorting criterion. Leave the Ascending sort option.
-
Add the Creation Date field. Change to the Descending sort option.
-
Define 100 as the threshold in the Size limit section.
img-md modal-image 
These 100 new youngest recipients are then excluded from the main target.
Check your control group check-control-group
You can view the logs to check and identify the exluded profiles. Let’s take the example of a random exclusion on five profiles.
After the delivery preparation, you can review how the exclusions were applied:
-
In delivery dashboard, before the sending, check the To exclude KPI.
img-md modal-image 
-
In the delivery logs, the Logs tab shows the exclusion step.
img-md modal-image 
-
The Exclusion causes tab displays the number of excluded profile for each typology rule.
img-md modal-image 
For more information on delivery logs, refer to this section.
Add an extra population extra-population
Another way to define a control group is to select a specific population in an existing audience or by defining 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.
Compare the results control-group-results
Once the delivery is sent, you can extract the sending logs to compare behavior between the profiles which did not receive the communication and the effective target. You can also use the delivery logs to build a new targeting.
To see which profiles were removed from the target, check the Delivery logs. Learn more in this section.