9.1 Offer Decisioning 101

Offer Decisioning - Offer Decisioning 101

9.1.1 Terminology

To get a better understanding about Offer Decisioning, we highly recommend you to read the overview on how the Offer Decisioning Application Service works with Adobe Experience Platform.

Working with Offer Decisioning, you need to understand the following concepts:

Term	Explanation
Offer	An offer is a marketing message that may have rules associated with it that specify who is eligible to see the offer. An offer has a status: draft, approved or archived.
Placement	The combination of location (or Channel Type) and context (or Content Type) in which an offer appears for an end-user. Effectively it is the combination of Text, HTML, Image, JSON in Mobile, Web, Social, Instant Messaging, and non-Digital channels.
Rule	The logic that defines and controls the eligibility of end-users for an offer.
Personalized Offer	A customizable marketing message based on eligibility rules and constraints.
Fallback Offer	The default offer displayed when an end-user is not eligible for any of the offers in the collection used.
Capping	Used in an offer definition to define how many times an offer can be presented in total and to a specific user.
Priority	Level to determine the priority rank from a result set of offers.
Collection	Used to filter out a sub-set of offers from the personalized offer list to speed up the offer decisioning process.
Decision	A combination of a set of offers, placement and profile the marketer wants the decision engine to provide the best offer for.
AEM Assets Essentials	A universal and centralized experience for storing, finding, and selecting assets across Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions and Adobe Experience Platform.

9.1.2 Offer Decisioning

Login to Adobe Journey Optimizer by going to Adobe Experience Cloud. Click Journey Optimizer.

ACOP

You'll be redirected to the Home view in Journey Optimizer. First, make sure you're using the correct sandbox. The sandbox to use is called --aepSandboxId--. To change from one sandbox to another, click on PRODUCTION Prod (VA7) and select the sandbox from the list. In this example, the sandbox is named AEP Enablement FY22. You'll then be in the Home view of your sandbox --aepSandboxId--.

ACOP

In the left menu, click Offers. You'll now see the Offers menu, which contains things like Offers, Collections and Decisions.

Placements

Click Components. You'll now see the Offers menu, which contains things like Placements, Tags, Rules and Rankings.

Placements

9.1.3 Placements

Go to Placements.

Placements

In the Placements tab you can define your placements for your offers. When you define a decision the placement defines where the resulting offer will appear (Channel Type) and in what shape or form (Content Type).

If you don't see any placements in your Adobe Experience Platform instance, please create them as indicated below and in the screenshot.

Name	Channel Type	Content Type
Non-digital - Text	Non-digital	Text
Web - JSON	Web	JSON
Web - HTML	Web	HTML
Web - Text	Web	Text
Web - Image	Web	Image
Email - JSON	Email	JSON
Email - HTML	Email	HTML
Email - Text	Email	Text
Email - Image	Email	Image

Please do not change anything to the placements already available.

Click on any Placement to visualize its settings.

Placements

You'll now see all fields of the Placement:

• Name of the Placement

• Placement ID

• Channel Type for the Placement

• Content Type of the Placement, which can be Text, HTML, Image or JSON

• Description field allowing to add additional description for the Placement

9.1.4 Decision Rules

A Rule (also called eligibility rule) is the equivalent of a Segment. A Rule is in fact a Segment itself with the only difference that a Rule can be used with an Offer to provide the best offer to a profile in Adobe Experience Platform.

As you already know how to define Segments based on the previous enablement modules, let's just quickly revisit the Segmentation Environment:

Go to Rules. Click + Create Rule.

Decision Rules

You'll then see the Segmentation environment of Adobe Experience Platform.

Decision Rules

You can now access all fields that are part of the Union Schema for the Real-time Customer Profile and can build out any rule.

It's also interesting to know that you can simply reuse already defined segments in Adobe Experience Platform, by going to Audiences > --aepTenantIdSchema--.

Decision Rule

You'll then see this:

Decision Rule

If you wish, you can now configure your own Rules. For this exercise, you'll need two rules:

• all - Male Customers

• all - Female Customers

If these rules don't exist yet, please to create them. If they already exist, please use those rules and don't create new rules.

The attribute to use to build the rule is XDM Individual Profile > Person > Gender.

As an example, here's the rule definition for the rule all - Male Customers:

Decision Rule

As an example, here's the rule definition for the rule all - Female Customers:

Decision Rule

9.1.5 Offers

Go to Offers and select Offers. Click + Create Offer.

Decision Rule

You'll then see this popup.

Decision Rule

Don't create any offers now - you'll do that in the next exercise.

You now see that there are two types of offers:

• Personalized Offers

• Fallback Offers

A Personalized Offer is specific content that should be shown in a specific situation. A Personalized Offer is specifically built to deliver a personal and contextual experience if specific criteria are met.

A Fallback Offer is an offer that is shown if the criteria for Personalized Offers aren't met.

9.1.6 Decisions

A Decision combines placements, a collection of personalized offers and a fallback offer to ultimately be used by the Offer Decisioning engine to find the best offer for a specific profile, based on each of the individual personalized offer characteristics like priority, eligibility constraint and total / user capping.

To configure your Decision, click Decisions.

Decision Rule

In the next exercise, you'll configure your own offers and decision.