A campaign – the framework that organizes and serves your promotional content – comprises up to 20 experiences. Each experience can target various visitor segments and test content variations, optimize, or automatically assign content variations based on user affinity profiles. For example, you can run a hero banner with different experiences for "tech enthusiasts" and "gear lovers", and then test different promotions within each group.
Each experience has 2 main building blocks:
- Targeting: Determines who is served the experience, where on your site, and at what time.
- Variations: Determine what content is served to the targeted visitors.
Targeting experiences
Personalize an experience by targeting your audience. You can target visitors by different sets of conditions, such as past behavior (for example, visitors who added items to the cart), technology (say, mobile users), traffic source (social networks), CRM or third-party data, and time (weekend only). Only visitors who meet your target conditions are served with the experience.
If a visitor meets the conditions for more than one targeted experience, the one with the highest priority is served. If a visitor doesn’t meet any of the conditions, the default experience is served. Learn more about Targeting.
Experience variations
A variation is what you serve your targeted visitors. Depending on the type of campaign, a variation is typically a promotion or content served by Dynamic Content, Overlays, Notifications, Product Recommendations, or JavaScript code fired by a Custom Code campaign. You can create a single variation or multiple variations to test and optimize your campaigns.
There are 3 ways to create variations:
- Create a new variation from scratch: Select an out-of-the-box template or a custom template built by your developer.
- Use an existing variation by clicking Copy from another experience and then editing the copy to your needs.
- Create variations using a data feed when you have a large number of variations, and you want to automate and sync their content by connecting them to a data source.
Learn more about Creating Variations.
Allocation method
The allocation method determines how the variations are served to your targeted audience:
- A/B test: Manually assign the percentage of visitors assigned to the control group and each content variation. When enough data is collected, the system declares a winning variation. However, it's up to you to decide whether to continue serving all running variations or pause/delete poorly performing variations.
- Dynamic Allocation: Automatically shift traffic toward the best-performing variation in real time. You can assign traffic to your control group and measure the uplift generated from the automatic allocation performance.
- User Affinity: Tag each content variation with the affinity values most relevant to the content (say, Children, Shoes, Boots); then, the Dynamic Yield affinity-based personalization engine automatically allocates the optimal variation for each user based on their current, real-time preferences and affinity profile. When allocating content by affinity, there's no need to set up additional affinity-based targeting conditions, as the affinity tags serve for all targeting purposes. For the same reason, there is no need to set up separate targeted experiences for every variation, as all variations can be added to a single targeted experience.
Learn more about Traffic Allocation and how to select the right method for your experiences.
Primary metric
The primary metric is the experience’s objective, which determines your variations' success. For example, the objective of a newsletter signup overlay is to increase subscriptions. Purchase, revenue, and goals are available in your reports by default. However, selecting the right primary metric has significance: In A/B tests, it's the parameter that determines the winning variations, whereas in User Affinity allocation, it determines whether the affinity-based allocation or control group yielded better results. In the dynamic allocation method, traffic adjusts towards the variation that improves this metric.
The system provides the following metrics:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Purchases
- Submissions (Financial Institutions only)
- Purchase revenue
- Goal conversions (custom)
- Unit CTR
Learn more about Primary Metrics.
Experience settings
Fine-tune your experience's success parameters by clicking the settings icon:
- A/B Test Options: Define the Probability to Be Best score required for a variation to be declared as a winning variation, the minimum time required before a winner is declared, and the recipient of the declaration notification email.
- Advanced settings: Define the stickiness and the attribution window.
Learn more about Experience Advanced Settings.