Redirect offers - A4T FAQ

Your implementation must meet the following minimum requirements:

• Experience Cloud Visitor ID Service: visitorAPI.js version 2.3.0 or later.
• Adobe Analytics: appMeasurement.js version 2.1.
• Adobe Target: at.js version 1.6.2 or later.

The three libraries must be included on both the page with the redirect offer and the page to which the visitor is redirected.

A limited number of customers have reported higher degrees of variance in traffic distribution when using redirect offers in activities configured with Analytics for Target (A4T).

Consider the following:

• Incorrect order of Target and Analytics calls might be responsible for higher degrees of variance.

  The Target call must precede the Analytics call on the source page (where redirect occurs) and on the destination page (where redirect ends).

• Ensure that you use redirect offers in A4T redirect activities.

• If there are multiple Target location requests on the source page (where the redirect occurs), Adobe recommends that you run the redirect activity on the first Target location request.

  Running the redirect activity on the first Target location request reduces the chances of any activity qualifications happening on other Target location requests and getting counted in the report. Visitors who are redirected need not be counted in the reports of other activities as they will not see the experiences.

When using at.js version 1.6.3 or later, counting page views on both pages is not an issue. This race condition affects only customers using earlier versions. The Target team maintains two versions of at.js: the current version and the second-latest version. Upgrade at.js as necessary to ensure that you are running a supported version.

If you are using an earlier, non-supported version of at.js, there is a possibility that a race condition can occur that might cause the Analytics call to fire before the redirect executes on the first page. This situation can cause page views on the original page and on the redirect page to all be counted. This situation results in an extra page view on the first page, when the visitor never really “saw” this first page.

Using the form-based composer to build a redirect activity is recommended to increase the speed of the page redirect because of where the code gets executed on the page. Also, creating a redirect offer for every experience, even the default experience, where the redirect would return the original page is recommended. Creating a redirect offer for each experience ensures that if mis-counting occurs, it happens across all experiences. Reporting and analysis are still valid for the test.

One reason you might want to use redirect offers for all experiences in the activity, including the default (control) experience, is to put the same conditions on all experiences. For example, if the default experience does not have a redirect offer but the other experiences have redirect offers, the speed of the experience without the redirect offer has an inherent advantage. Redirect offers are recommended for temporary scenarios only, such as testing. Redirect offers are not recommended for permanent scenarios, such as personalization. After you determine the “winner,” you should remove the redirect to improve page-load performance.

Yes, both composers are supported as long as you use the built-in redirect offers.

If you use your own custom code for the redirect, you must ensure that you populate the two new parameters associated with redirect URLs ( adobe_mc_sdid and adobe_mc_ref, explained below).

The following query string parameters are associated with redirect offers:

These parameters are automatically added to the redirect URLs when using the built-in redirect offers in the VEC and Form-Based Experience Composer when the Visitor Id service is implemented on the page. If you are using your own custom redirect code in the VEC or Form-Based Composer, you must be sure to pass these parameters with your custom code.

Use a custom-coded redirect if:

• You are not using A4T with your redirect activity
• You have the Visitor Id service implemented
• You don’t want these parameters to be automatically added to your URLs

However, as best practice, you might want to keep the adobe_mc_ref parameter in the URL in order to report the referrer information to Analytics correctly.

If you use A4T and redirect offers, Target appends the adobe_mc_ref and adobe_mc_sdid parameters to the URL. These values are already URL encoded. Most of the time everything works as expected, however, some customers might have load balancers or WEB servers that try to encode the query string parameters one more time.

Because of this double encoding when the Visitor API tries to decode the adobe_mc_sdid value, it can’t extract the SDID value and generates a new SDID. This process leads to incorrect SDID values being sent to Target and Analytics and you see uneven split for redirects in Analytics reports.

Adobe recommends that you talk to your IT team to ensure that adobe_mc_ref and adobe_mc_sdid are allowlisted so that these values are not transformed in any way.

Suppose that a visitor clicks a link on www.google.com to your homepage (www.mysite.com/index.html) on which a redirect activity is live and is then redirected to a new page (www.mysite.com/index2.html).

Previously, the Analytics request on the new page would report a referring URL of www.mysite.com/index.html instead of www.google.com. This caused inaccurate reporting in Analytics associated with the referring URLs (Marketing Channel reports, for example). The reports had lost the fact that you came to the site from www.google.com.

With at.js version 0.9.6 (or later) and AppMeasurement.js 2.1 (or later), the Analytics request on the new page reports a referring URL of www.google.com.