Activities overview

Last update: 2025-02-07

Personalize content and test page designs for specific audiences with Adobe Target activities.

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 displays, 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 you can choose 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

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 in your Target implementation and lets you perform various actions.

The following table helps you understand various elements on the Activities list in the Target UI:

Element Description
Show filters icon

Show Filters icon

 Access filters by clicking the Show Filters icon near the top of the list to filter activities by Type, Status, Reporting Source, Experience Composer, Metrics Type, Decisioning Source, Activity Source, and Properties.

Filters you configure are persistent across the current session.

For more information, see Apply filters to the Activities list below.
Search fields Quickly find an activity or reduce the number of activities displayed in the Activity list. You can search by Activity Name, URL, or ID by using the drop-down.

Search options you configure are persistent across the current session.
Create Activity Create an activity.

For more information about creating the various activity types, see:

For more information about each type, see Activity types below.
Create mobile preview link

More actions menu

 Use mobile preview links to perform easy end-to-end QA for mobile app activities.

Click the More options icon, select the Create Mobile Preview Link, then choose the activities you want to test on mobile.
Customize Table

Customize Table icon

 Change which columns display in the Activity list by clicking the Customize Table icon on the upper right side of the page, then selecting or deselecting the desired columns.

The changes are applied to your account and remain active even after you log out of Target.
Bulk operations checkboxes

Bulk Operations icon

 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.
Type 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.
Name The name of the activity. Click the Quick Info icon ( Quick Info icon ) next to each activity name to view more information about that activity in a pop-up card, including the Activity ID, Activity Objective, Activity Location, Goal, and Status.

Click the More actions icon ( More Actions icon ) 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.
Status 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.
Last Updated 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.
Priority 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.

For more information about priority settings, see Priority under Activity Settings in Goals and settings.
Property Shows the property for the activity.

Enterprise user permissions is a Target Premium feature.
Estimated Lift in Revenue 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.
Source Shows where the activity was created: Adobe Target, Adobe Target API, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, or Adobe Mobile Services.
Author The name of the person who created the activity.
Decisioning Method The decisioning method used in each activity: Server-Side or Client-Side.

Activity 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, use the Adobe Target Activities Guide.

Activity Type Description
A/B Test A/B testing compares two or more versions of your website content to see which version best improves your conversions during a pre-specified test period.
Auto-Allocate Auto-Allocate, a type of A/B test, identifies a winner among two or more experiences and automatically reallocates more traffic to the winner to increase conversions while the test continues to run and learn.
Auto-Target

Target Premium

 Auto-Target, a type of A/B test, uses advanced machine learning to identify multiple high performing marketer-defined experiences, and serves the most tailored experience to each visitor based on the individual customer’s profile and the behavior of previous visitors with similar profiles, to personalize content and drive conversions.
Multivariate Test Multivariate Testing (MVT) compares combinations of offers in elements on a page to determine which combination performs the best for a specific audience, and identifies which element most impacts the activity’s success.
Experience Targeting Experience Targeting (XT) delivers content to a specific audience based on a set of marketer-defined rules and criteria.
Automated Personalization

Target Premium

 Automated Personalization (AP) combines offers or messages, and uses advanced machine learning to match different variations to each visitor based on their individual customer profile, to personalize content and drive conversions.
Recommendations

Target Premium

 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

Access filters by clicking the Show Filters icon ( Show Filters icon ) near the top of the list.

The menu lets you filter activities by the following attributes:

Attribute Details
Type Filter by activity type.
Status Filter by activity status.
  • 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.
Reporting Source Filter by reporting source.
  • Analytics: Display activities that use Analytics for Target (A4T) as the reporting source.
  • Target: Display activities that use Target as the reporting source.
  • Customer Journey Analytics: Display activities that use Adobe Customer Analytics as the reporting source.
Experience Composer 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.
Metrics Type Filter by which success metric was chosen during activity creation.
  • Conversion
  • Revenue
  • Engagement
  • Use an Analytics metric
Decisioning Method 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.
Activity Source Filter by the activity source used to create each activity.
Property Filter by the property in which the activity was created.

Perform quick actions

Click the More actions icon ( More actions menu ) 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):

Action Description
Edit 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.
Deactivate 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.
Activate Start an inactive activity or an activity that is ready to be activated.
Archive 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 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 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:

  • Archived and Ended activities do not appear in the Activities list. To view these activities, filter them using the Filters icon ( Show Filters icon ) at the top of the list.

  • 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.

  • 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. Automated Personalization, Auto-Allocate, and Auto-Target always use Target data.

  • 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

Each Target activity has the following content limitations:

Item Limit
Unique selectors 300 if a selector is repeated in a different experience, it is counted once. However, if it is repeated in the same experience, it is counted again.
Offers in each experience 350
Click track selectors in metrics 50
Mboxes in metrics 50
Audiences and locations 50 audiences and locations (mbox) combinations should not be more than 50.

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

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 list is opened, with a maximum delay of ten minutes.

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