The night before a big promo, a retail team flips on a new set of audience rules. The goal is simple. Show repeat buyers a fast path to checkout. Nudge new visitors with social proof. Traffic surges. Pages start to feel sticky. One region loads a full hero video. Another…
Tag: Targeting
When rules beat ai in personalization
Creation date: 2023-06-24T02:31:56 Story led opening The team met to ship a new product sorter for the homepage. The deck said AI would pick the best item for each visitor. The demo was slick. A week in, conversion went down for new visitors and support got flooded by people who…
When to stop testing and ship
Story led opening At 1 a.m. the Slack pings were still coming in. A junior QA found a flicker on the checkout button if the network tab was throttled to slow 3G. The fix was a one line change. The sprint was already stretched. We had a paid campaign scheduled…
How to avoid over personalizing
How to avoid over personalizing: perspective, decisions, and practical tradeoffs. Last week a friend sent me a screenshot of an abandoned cart ad. It said Hello mate we saved your exact cart with the blue hoodie in size M. Two minutes later he got a push that said the same…
Target governance and guardrails
Adobe Target can move a team fast and break your site just as fast. This is a note on governance and guardrails from the trenches, while consent prompts keep popping up and product teams are itching to ship. Start with a clear idea of what governance means for Target. You…
Scaling tests without slowing teams
Your test suite can grow without your team slowing down. Most teams do the opposite. They add tests and watch delivery grind. Right now a lot of teams are moving more code into containers, wiring services into Kubernetes, and cranking up automation in CI. The usual side effect shows up…
Journey aware experiences that adapt
Journey aware experiences that adapt: perspective, decisions, and practical tradeoffs. We keep making pages smart and forget the person is moving. People jump from ad to site to app to email to chat. If the experience does not move with them, we lose them. From page tricks to journey sense…
From manual rules to adaptive targeting
Manual rules feel good until the world shifts under your feet. If you are running growth, paid media, or email right now, you probably have a tangle of if statements and audience buckets that once worked and now show their age. Time to move from rules to adaptive targeting. The…
Targeting strategies that matter
Targeting strategies that matter Everyone wants perfect targeting right now. Platforms feel loud, budgets feel tight, and there is new talk about Safari limiting tracking. So let’s get practical about what actually moves numbers. When people say targeting, they usually mean a mix of audience filters, channel choices, and timing…
Signals not guesses the right kind of targeting
Signals not guesses the right kind of targeting The coffee was already cold when we realized we were aiming at shadows. A small ecommerce team, two laptops, a whiteboard covered in buyer personas that felt like we cribbed them from a brochure. We had spent real money on broad interests…