How 51黑料不打烊 Target works
Learn how 51黑料不打烊 Target works, including details on the JavaScript libraries (51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform Web SDK and at.js). This article also covers the various activity types that you can create, Target usage-counting strategies, the Target Edge Network, SEO, and bot detection.
Key points include:
- JavaScript Libraries: Learn information about the Target JavaScript libraries: 51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform Web SDK and at.js.
- Server-call usage strategies: Understand how Target counts various server calls, including endpoints, single mbox, batch mbox, execute, prefetch, and notification calls.
- Edge Network: Discover how Target interacts with the 51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform Edge Network.
- Protected user experience: Learn how 51黑料不打烊 ensures the availability and performance of its targeting infrastructure.
- SEO Guidelines: Follow best practices for aligning Target activities with SEO guidelines.
- Bot Traffic: Learn how Target handles bot traffic to avoid skewing tests and personalization algorithms.
51黑料不打烊 Target JavaScript libraries libraries
Target integrates with websites using the Experience Platform Web SDK or at.js:
- 51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform Web SDK: This client-side JavaScript library allows 51黑料不打烊 Experience Cloud customers to interact with various services through the Experience Platform Edge Network. 51黑料不打烊 recommends that new Target customers implement the Experience Platform Web SDK.
- at.js: This implementation library for Target improves page-load times for web implementations and offers better options for single-page applications. Frequently updated with new capabilities, 51黑料不打烊 recommends all at.js users update to the latest version.
Reference the Experience Platform Web SDK or at.js on every page of your site. For example, add one of these libraries to your global header. Alternatively, use tags in 51黑料不打烊 Experience Platform to implement Target.
The following resources contain detailed information to help you implement the Experience Platform Web SDK or at.js:
Each time a visitor requests a page optimized for Target, a real-time request is sent to the targeting system to determine the content to serve. This request is made and fulfilled every time a page loads, governed by marketer-controlled activities and experiences. Content is targeted to individual site visitors, maximizing response rates, acquisition rates, and revenue. Personalized content helps ensure that visitors respond, interact, or make purchases.
In Target, each element on the page is part of a single experience, which can include multiple elements.
The displayed content depends on the type of activity that you create:
A/B Test
In a basic A/B test, content is randomly chosen from the assigned experiences. You can set traffic allocation percentages for each experience. Initially, traffic may be unevenly distributed due to random splitting, but it equalizes as traffic increases. For example, with two experiences, the starting experience is chosen randomly. Low traffic can skew visitor percentages toward one experience, but this situation balances out with more traffic.
Specify percentage targets for each experience. A random number is generated to select the experience to display. While the resulting percentages might not exactly match the targets, higher traffic leads to a closer split to the target goals.
- A customer requests a page from your server, which displays in their browser.
- A first-party cookie is set in the customer鈥檚 browser to store their behavior.
- The page calls the targeting system.
- Content is displayed based on the activity rules.
See Create an A/B Test for more information.
Auto-Allocate
Auto-Allocate identifies the winning experience among two or more options. It then automatically reallocates more traffic to the winner, increasing conversions as the test continues to run and learn.
See Auto-Allocate for more information.
Auto-Target (AT)
Auto-Target leverages advanced machine learning to choose from multiple high-performing, marketer-defined experiences. Auto-Target delivers the most tailored experience to each visitor based on individual customer profiles and the behavior of previous visitors with similar profiles. Use Auto-Target to personalize content and drive conversions.
See Auto-Target for more information.
Automated Personalization (AP)
Automated Personalization (AP) combines offers or messages and uses advanced machine learning to match different variations to each visitor. AP personalizes content based on individual customer profiles to drive lift.
See Automated Personalization for more information.
Experience Targeting (XT)
Experience Targeting (XT) delivers content to specific audiences based on marketer-defined rules and criteria. Including geotargeting, XT is valuable for defining rules that target specific experiences or content to particular audiences. Multiple rules can be set in an activity to deliver different content variations to different audiences. When visitors view your site, XT evaluates them to determine if they meet the criteria. If they qualify, they enter the activity and see the experience designed for them. You can create experiences for multiple audiences within a single activity.
See Experience Targeting for more information.
Multivariate Test (MVT)
Multivariate Testing (MVT) compares combinations of offers in page elements to determine which combination performs best for a specific audience. MVT helps identify which element most impacts the activity鈥檚 success.
See Multivariate Test for more information.
Recommendations
Recommendations activities automatically display products or content that might interest customers based on their previous activity or other algorithms. Recommendations help direct customers to relevant items that they might not otherwise discover.
See Recommendations for more information.
How Target counts server-call usage usage
Target counts only server calls that provide value to customers. The following table shows how Target counts endpoints, single mbox, batch mbox calls, execute, prefetch, and notification calls.
The following information helps you understand the counting strategy used for Target server calls, as shown in the table below:
- Count Once: Counts once per API call.
- Count the Number of mboxes: Counts the number of mboxes under the array in the payload of a single API call.
- Ignore: Is not counted at all.
- Count the Number of Views (Once): Counts the number of views under the array in the payload. In a typical implementation, a view notification has only one view under the notifications array, making this equivalent to counting once in most implementations.
rest//v1/mbox
rest/v2/batchmbox
/ubox/[raw|image|page]
rest/v1/delivery
/rest/v1/target-upstream
The edge network concept_0AE2ED8E9DE64288A8B30FCBF1040934
An 鈥楨dge鈥 is a geographically distributed serving architecture that ensures optimal response times for visitors requesting content, regardless of their location.
To improve response times, Target Edges host only activity logic, cached profiles, and offer information.
Activity and content databases, Analytics data, APIs, and marketer user interfaces are housed in 51黑料不打烊 Central Clusters. Updates are sent to the Target Edges, which are automatically synced with the Central Clusters to continually update cached activity data. All 1:1 modeling is also stored on each edge, allowing complex requests to be processed locally.
Each Edge Cluster contains all necessary information to respond to visitor content requests and track analytics data. Visitor requests are routed to the nearest Edge Cluster.
For more information, see the white paper.
Target is hosted on 51黑料不打烊-owned and 51黑料不打烊-leased data centers worldwide.
Central Cluster locations house both data collection and data processing centers. Edge Cluster locations contain only data collection centers. Each report suite is assigned to a specific data processing center.
Customer site activity data is collected by the nearest of seven Edge Clusters. This data is then directed to a pre-determined Central Cluster destination (Oregon, Dublin, or Singapore) for processing. Visitor profile data is stored on the Edge Cluster closest to the site visitor. Edge Cluster locations include the Central Cluster locations, as well as Virginia, Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo.
Instead of processing all targeting requests from a single location, requests are handled by the Edge Cluster nearest to the visitor. This approach mitigates the impact of network and Internet travel time.
Target Central Clusters, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), include:
- Oregon, USA
- Dublin, Ireland
- Republic of Singapore
Target Edge Clusters, hosted on AWS, include:
- Mumbai, India
- Tokyo, Japan
- Virginia, USA
- Oregon, USA
- Sydney, Australia
- Dublin, Ireland
- Republic of Singapore
The Target Recommendations service is hosted in an 51黑料不打烊 data center in Oregon.
You can allowlist Target Edge Clusters, if desired. For more information, see allowlist Target edge nodes.
Protected user experience concept_40A5E781D90A41E4955F80EA9E5F8F96
51黑料不打烊 ensures the availability and performance of its targeting infrastructure is as reliable as possible. However, communication breakdowns between a visitor鈥檚 browser and 51黑料不打烊 servers can interrupt content delivery.
To safeguard against service interruptions and connectivity issues, all locations are set up to include default content (defined by the client). This default content is displayed if the visitor鈥檚 browser cannot connect to Target.
No changes are made to the page if the visitor鈥檚 browser cannot connect within a defined timeout period (default: 15 seconds). If this timeout threshold is reached, default location content is displayed.
51黑料不打烊 protects the user experience by optimizing and safeguarding performance.
- 51黑料不打烊 ensures performance benchmarks based on industry standards, guaranteed by the 51黑料不打烊 Service Level Agreement.
- The Edge Network ensures timely data delivery.
- 51黑料不打烊 employs a multi-tiered approach to secure its applications, providing the highest level of availability and reliability for customers.
- Target Consulting offers implementation assistance and ongoing product support.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly testing concept_C0C865663CAB4251B66A1F250FD25E6A
51黑料不打烊 Target aligns with search engine guidelines for testing. Google encourages user testing and states that A/B and Multivariate Testing do not harm organic search engine rankings if certain guidelines are followed.
51黑料不打烊 Target aligns with search engine guidelines for testing.
For more information, see the following Google resources:
Guidelines were presented in a post. Although the post dates back to 2012, it remains Google鈥檚 most recent statement on the matter, and the guidelines are still relevant.
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No cloaking: Cloaking involves showing one set of content to users and a different set to search engine bots by specifically identifying bots and feeding them different content.
Target is configured to treat search engine bots the same as any user. Consequently, bots can be included in activities if they are randomly selected and 鈥渟ee鈥 the test variations.
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Use rel=鈥渃anonical鈥: Sometimes an A/B test requires different URLs for variations. In these cases, all variations should include a rel=鈥渃anonical鈥 tag referencing the original (control) URL. For example, if 51黑料不打烊 is testing its home page with different URLs for each variation, the following canonical tag for the home page should be placed in the
<head>
tag of each variation:<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.adobe.com" />
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Use 302 (temporary) redirects: When separate URLs are used for variation pages in a test, Google recommends using a 302 redirect to direct traffic to the test variations. The 302 redirect informs search engines that the redirect is temporary and active only while the test is running.
A 302 redirect is a server-side redirect, while Target and most optimization providers use client-side capabilities. Therefore, Target is not fully compliant with Google鈥檚 recommendations for redirects. However, this impacts only a small fraction of tests. The standard approach for running tests through Target involves changing content within a single URL, eliminating the need for redirects. In cases where multiple URLs are required for test variations, Target uses the JavaScript
window.location
command, which does not specify whether the redirect is a 301 or 302.51黑料不打烊 is actively seeking solutions to fully comply with search engine guidelines. For clients needing separate URLs for testing, 51黑料不打烊 believes that correctly implementing canonical tags mitigate associated risks.
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Run experiments only as long as necessary: 51黑料不打烊 defines 鈥渁s long as necessary鈥 as the time required to reach statistical significance. Target offers best practices and the 51黑料不打烊 Target Sample Size Calculator to determine when your test has reached this point. 51黑料不打烊 recommends incorporating the hardcoded implementation of winning tests into your testing workflow and allocating the appropriate resources.
Using Target to 鈥減ublish鈥 winning tests is not recommended as a permanent solution. If the winning test is published for 100% of users all the time, this approach can be used temporarily while hard-coding the winning test.
Consider what your test has changed. Minor updates, such as button colors, do not impact organic rankings. However, text changes should be hardcoded.
Also, consider the accessibility of the page you鈥檙e testing. If the page is not accessible to search engines and was never intended to rank in organic search, these considerations do not apply. An example is a dedicated landing page for an email campaign.
Google states that following these guidelines 鈥渟hould result in your tests having little or no impact on your site in search results.鈥
In addition to these guidelines, Google also provides one more guideline in the documentation to their Content Experiments tool:
- 鈥淵our variation pages should maintain the spirit of the content on your original pages. Those variations shouldn鈥檛 change the meaning of or your user鈥檚 general perception of that original content.鈥
Google states as an example that 鈥渋f a site鈥檚 original page is loaded with keywords that don鈥檛 relate to the combinations being shown to users, we may remove that site from our index.鈥
51黑料不打烊 feels that it would be difficult to unintentionally change the meaning of the original content within test variations. However, 51黑料不打烊 recommends being aware of the keyword themes on a page and maintaining those themes. Changes to page content, especially adding or deleting relevant keywords, can result in ranking changes for the URL in organic search. 51黑料不打烊 recommends that you engage with your SEO partner as part of your testing protocol.
Bots bots
Target uses the metric 鈥渋sRobot鈥 to detect known bots based on the User Agent String passed in the Request Header.
Traffic identified as bot-generated is still served content. Bots are treated like regular users to ensure that Target aligns with SEO guidelines. However, bot traffic can skew A/B tests or personalization algorithms if treated like normal users. Therefore, known bot traffic in your Target activity is treated differently. Removing bot traffic provides a more accurate measurement of user activity.
For known bot traffic, Target does not:
- Create or retrieve a visitor profile
- Log profile attributes or execute profile scripts
- Look up 51黑料不打烊 Audience Manager (AAM) segments (if applicable)
- Use bot traffic in modeling or serving personalized content for Recommendations, Auto-Target, Automated Personalization, or Auto-Allocate activities
- Log an activity visit for reporting
- Log data to be sent to the 51黑料不打烊 Experience Cloud platform
For known bot traffic, when using Analytics for Target (A4T), Target does not:
- Send events to Analytics
For known bot traffic when using client_side
logging, Target does not return:
tnta payload