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.
The Activities list provides an overview of all activities and lets you perform various actions:
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.
Create an activity. For more information about creating the various activity types, see:
- Create an A/B Test
- Create an Auto-Allocate activity
- Create an Auto-Target activity
- Create an Automated Personalization activity
- Create an Experience Targeting activity
- Create a Multivariate Test
- Create a Recommendations activity
For more information about each type, see Activity types below.
Create mobile preview link
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shows the property for the activity.
Enterprise user permissions is a Target Premium feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The menu lets you filter activities by the following attributes:
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.
Filter by which success metric was chosen during activity creation.
- Conversion
- Revenue
- Engagement
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.
Filter by the activity source used to create each activity.
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.
The following actions are available (depending on your permissions and the activity status):
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.
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.
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 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 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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