Offer reporting groups in Automated Personalization
Information about using reporting groups in Adobe Target Automated Personalization (AP) activities.
Reporting groups perform two key functions:
- Reporting groups let you see your offers grouped in AP activity reporting.
- Reporting groups play a key role with how the Target personalization models function.
When you use reporting groups, Target creates one personalization model for each reporting group using the data from all offers in that group. Without reporting groups, Target creates a personalization model for each offer in your AP activity.
If your activity setup doesn’t have enough data for a personalization model to be built per offer, reporting groups help reduce the data requirements to use Automated Personalization. Reporting groups can also help solve the “cold start” problem for new offers by grouping similar offers so that each model gets more data to train on. Modeling groups can also be used for activities where new offers are introduced regularly to your AP activity.
This approach works well if visitors respond the same way to all offers in a group. Best practice is to group offers that similar groups of visitors respond to in a similar way. In order words, group offers with similar conversion rates. You should never put all offers into a single reporting group. Grouping all offers or grouping offers with different conversion rates likely reduces the effectiveness of the Target personalization models.
Set up reporting groups
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On the Experiences page of an AP activity, click the Manage Content icon.
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Click the Offers tab at the top of the Manage Content dialog box.
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(Conditional) Add specific experiences to a reporting group by hovering over the desired offer and then by clicking the Reporting Group folder icon.
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(Conditional) Batch include experiences in a reporting group by selecting the checkboxes for the relevant experiences and then by clicking the Reporting Group folder icon in the top-right corner of the dialog box.
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To assign the selected offer to an existing reporting group, select Existing, select the desired reporting group from the drop-down list, then click Apply.
Or
To create a reporting group to assign the selected offer to, select New, name the new reporting group, then click Apply.
You can use the Location list to filter offers by location. Use the Report Group list to filter offers by reporting groups. You can also use the Report Group list to filter for Unassigned Offers so you can assign a reporting group to an offer that is not currently assigned to any reporting group.
For information about targeting an offer to specific audiences, see Target Automated Personalization offers.
Caveats
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It is important to understand that reporting groups impact how Target builds its models. As a result, Adobe recommends that you use reporting groups only if you plan to replace or add new offers while an activity is live. If a new offer is introduced into a live activity, putting the new offer into a group with existing similar offers allows the machine to use the data already collected for the other offers in its group to learn about the new offer. You should never put all offers into a single reporting group.
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AP activities have combinations of location+offer (modellables). When Target records data in reports, Target considers such combinations so it is clear from which event (display, click, and so forth) the offer came.
For example, an activity might have several locations and several offers, which might overlap. If a visitor sees more than one of these offers in different locations, Target records data for those offers only. If the same visitor later clicks an offer, Target records an event from that combination only (not for all combinations).
Similarly, if the click comes from a different location, which is present in a metric, but doesn’t display an offer, this event is logged under the activity, but not for any offer+location combination. As a result, this offer does not appear in the offer reporting group.
This behavior is because the click might be made from a different mbox and not the mbox that served the offer. Because of this, the metric is associated with the activity, but not with the offer.
View offers in a reporting group
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Click Activities, click the desired Automated Personalization activity from the list, then click the Reports tab to display the Offer Level report.
If you have many activities, click the Show Filters (funnel) icon, then select the Automated Personalization checkbox to filter the list to display only Automated Personalization activities.
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Click Control or Targeted in the table to display the ungrouped offers and offers inside reporting groups.
For information about using Automated Personalization reports (including the Offer Level report), see Automated Personalization Summary reports.