Provisioning a Conversion Mbox

This article guides you through the steps necessary to provision an mbox to track conversions with Adobe Test&Target.

Conversion Mboxes

For your Optimization tests to accurately calculate winning versions of your website content in Adobe Test&Target, you will need to set up an mbox to track your website conversion events based on the actions or goals you would like your visitors to complete while they are on your website.  While every mbox can be mapped to a conversion event in T&T for your tests, conversion mboxes contain extra information about your customer's order total, the order ID, and the products that were purchased.  If these special mbox parameters and their values are sent into T&T with your mbox request, T&T will record the order information at the user level and give you the ability to calculate different revenue metrics and base your winning recipe upon the appropriate metric that is important to you.

This conversion data that these special mbox parameters will need to leverage is typically found within the body content of your conversion pages.  Therefore, in order to give that data time to load so that it can be sent into your mbox request, you'll want to set your conversion mbox to deliver as an Ensighten page-specific, custom rule, leveraging Ensighten Manage's robust targeting capabilities to only deliver the conversion mbox rule on your confirmation or conversion pages.  Since the conversion mboxes typically perform passive tracking and do not actively deliver page content, they can be loaded asynchronously and run when the page has finished loading without impacting the user experience nor the page load time.

Provisioning Your Conversion Mbox

1.  To begin, launch the Ensighten Visual Tagger and click on the "Testing" button.  From there, click on the "T&T Provisioner" button to enter the module.

2.  Enter a name for your conversion mbox.  Keep it as semantically meaningful as possible so you will easily recognize it when setting up your T&T campaigns. 

3.  Next, choose the mbox type.  Select "Conversion" and continue.

4.  Click on the "Targeting" button to expand its contents.  From here you can build your conditional targeting which acts as a filter and only creates your mbox if the proper URL or Data Layer conditions are met.  While you can leave your targeting blank and run this mbox on every page of your site, globally, using the targeting in T&T to filter out when to fire your campaign, extra mbox calls accrue a cost both financially as well as for your overall page load performance, even if slight.  Using this targeting you can deliver your mbox only where it will be used and thus save on cost.  This is a very important step in optimizing your optimization efforts.

            4.1  First off, click the "+ Add Condition" link to create a new targeting condition which will appear at the bottom of the "Targeting" container.

            4.2  Check the checkbox at the top left of your new condition to set it as active.  Any conditions without their checkbox checked will not be compiled into the final, combined targeting logic.

            4.3  You can build your condition around data stored either in your current URL or by your predefined Data Library so select appropriately.

            4.4  Based on your selection, the next select box will populate with corresponding sub options.  Make your next selection and continue.

            4.5  Now choose an operator or evaluator for your condition in the third select box and continue.

            4.6  And finally, enter the final, conditional values upon which your new targeting condition will evaluate as "true".  For example, if you've selected "URL" and "Host" "equals" with the value of "mysite.com", an mbox will only be created on the "mysite.com" domain.  Or if you have selected "Data Library" and "Language" "equals" with the value of "en", your mbox will only be created for visitors that have their browser language set to English. 

            NOTE: If you do not have a Data Library predefined and delivered on your current page already, you will be shown a custom form field to enter any data element name you wish, assuming you'll be setting up that data element into your Data Library later.  If the data element that you have manually entered does not yet exist when your new mbox rule is deployed and running live on your site, the data element will evaluate as a "" blank string value within your condition logic.

            You may also enter multiple values within the value form field as a multi-line value, entering each value variation one by one on each line of the form field.  These value variations will evaluate as "OR" as in "this or that or that" and so on for as many values as you enter.  This way you can set up multiple variations of your condition to save on time.  Using the URL example above, you could have entered "URL" "Path" "equals" "/landingpage.html" "OR" "/landingAlternate.html"  As long as your visitor lands on one of those pages, your mbox will be created.

            4.7  If you wish to add another condition, simply click the "+ Add Condition" link again and repeat the steps above.

5.  Next, map the appropriate data elements from your Data Library to the corresponding three required conversion mbox parameters, "orderID", "orderTotal", and "productsPurchased".  If you do not have a Data Library predefined and delivered on your current page already, you will be shown the "Custom" form field to enter any value of your choosing.  If your custom value is wrapped in "" quotes as in "0.00", it will be sent in as is, hardcoded into your parameter value as in "orderTotal=0.0".  If you do not use "" quotes, you can enter custom Javascript and map your parameter value to any Javascript variable or object.  Be sure to confirm your Javascript entry by checking the conversion parameter preview at the bottom of the container as it will immediately evaluate and inform you of an "error" if your entry is invalid.

6.  Setting up "Mbox Parameters" is optional, but a great way to build user profiles and power targeting in T&T.  If you choose to send in extra targeting or profile data into T&T via your mbox, click the "Mbox Parameters" button to expand its contents.   

            6.1  First off, click the "+ Add Parameter" link to create a new mbox parameter which will appear at the bottom of the "Targeting" container. 

            6.2  Check the checkbox at the top left of your new condition to set it as active.  Any conditions without their checkbox checked will not be sent into your mbox request.

            6.3  Enter a name for your parameter.  Keep it as semantically meaningful as possible as you may be using this for targeting in T&T and will need to understand what it refers to.  In addition, if you intend to send this data into T&T to build a user persistent profile, enter "profile." at the start of your parameter name.

            6.4  Next, select the data element whose value you'd like to map into your new mbox parameter.  You'll notice as make your selections that you'll see a preview of your parameter name=value pair at the bottom of your parameter container that represents the data that will be sent into your mbox request.  At the bottom of your select box there are three special options, *Custom*, *All Data*, and *All Profiled*. 

-       *Custom* - allows you to manually enter in a custom value for your parameter without using your Data Library.

-       *All Data* - compiles all the Data Library data elements that exist on your page and sends the entire parameterized string into your mbox request. 

-       *All Profiled* - does the same thing as *All Data*, but prepends the "profile." syntax before each data element of your Data Library to build a persistent user profile in T&T out of your entire Data Library on each page that your mbox will be created.

            If you do not have a Data Library predefined and delivered on your current page already, you will be shown the *Custom* form field to enter any value of your choosing.  If your custom value is wrapped in "" quotes as in "purchase", it will be sent in as is, hardcoded into your parameter value as in "profile.step=purchase".  If you do not use "" quotes, you can enter custom Javascript and map your parameter value to any Javascript variable or object.  Be sure to confirm your Javascript entry by checking the parameter preview at the bottom of your parameter container as it will immediately evaluate and inform you of an "error" if your entry is invalid.

            6.5  If you wish to add another mbox parameter, simply click the "+ Add Parameter" link again and repeat the steps above.

7.  Once you've configured all your targeting and parameter options, you're ready to create your new mbox rule within Ensighten Manage.  Click the "Create Rule" button at the bottom.  Once clicked, every that has been check-boxed will be added and compiled into your mbox rule.  So long as you are currently logged into Ensighten Manage, your mbox rule will be posted directly into your account as a new custom rule, ready to be configured and approved for deployment.  If you do not see the "Rule created successfully" message, please log into Manage in a new tab or different browser and try again to ensure your rule becomes created.