Advantages of The Regional mbox
If you’re a digital marketer and have used Adobe’s optimization tool, Adobe Target, then you know all about mboxes. The Target mbox – or “marketing box” – is essentially the code used to trigger personalized content within an assigned location on a webpage based on specified various targeting criteria. The traditional definition of an mbox is a wrapper around a div element that enables swapping marketing content with the click of a mouse.
The evolution of the mbox has led to the global mbox, which is code placed at the top of each page where Target is implemented, enabling content manipulation anywhere within the page itself. The global mbox basically makes visual page modifications limitless, from copy changes to page element rearrangement and much more.
Despite these advancements of the global mbox and its extensive capabilities, the benefits of the traditional regional mbox often outweigh those of its fancy counterpart. Let’s examine the many advantages of keeping it “old school” and leveraging the regional mbox. After all, newer isn’t always better.
Multi-location activity management
Shane, a marketing manager at FancyPants.com, an online denim superstore, wants to set up a campaign promoting a new style of dungarees across the website. He identifies the homepage, the dungarees product page and the final step of the checkout flow as ideal locations for promotional banners. While the Visual Experience Composer (VEC) in Target is great for manually selecting a particular element to modify, it poses some additional considerations and risks when dealing with multiple locations.
For example, while the homepage hero and product page banner locations can easily be selected by Shane in the VEC, a particular step in a single-page app like a checkout flow can be a bit more complicated. To ensure a precise location is being modified correctly within an SPA, it is much more accurate and safer to wrap that page element in a regional mbox and swap with content that has already been tested to behave appropriately.
The VEC would require Shane to literally navigate to the precise step of the flow and then manually click the correct div container needing updated. There’s less inherent risk leveraging regional mboxes in this scenario, as well as no additional wait time for all pages to render within the VEC setup screen.
Lastly, mobile app targeting basically offers no alternative to regional mboxes, with the VEC only being supported by desktop and mobile web experiences. Modifications made to mobile app content require the usage of regional mboxes via the form composer in the Target UI.
Impression tracking simplicity
An AB test on the Jorts product page just concluded and Sienna, an optimization analyst at Fancy Pants, is studying the Adobe workspace to determine the winning experience. When calculating the click-through-rates of the two jorts experiences, the impression totals seem incredibly inflated, thus skewing the test’s primary KPI leaving Sienna completely bewildered. “I set the priority of this test below other targeted activities on this page, why is the traffic volume so insanely high?!” Sienna wonders.
Well, despite prioritizing this activity below several others on the jorts product page, it was built via the global mbox, so visitors who qualify for the targeting criteria of this activity will still count toward the total traffic within the test experiences. I know, that sounds crazy, but it’s true.
As noted by Softcrylic Sr. Consultant Andrew Johns here, “An Activity Impression does NOT mean that the user actually saw the content. […] Using the ‘global mbox’ Target will return all Activities and Experiences that the user qualifies for and will NOT deduplicate if they are modifying the same CSS selector.”
There are various reasons for why Target counts impressions this way, which Andrew documents in detail in the aforementioned post. Ultimately, digital marketers need to carefully consider the risks of potential “impression overlap” when targeting similar locations via the global mbox. Truly unique locations, mutually exclusive audiences or simply leveraging regional mboxes are all ways to prevent this potential analysis nightmare.
Advanced targeting capabilities
Adobe Target offers digital marketers a laundry list of out-of-the-box segmentation criteria when building experiences. These audience rules are applied at the mbox level, and determine if a visitor profile qualifies for a particular experience when the mbox call itself occurs. By definition, the global mbox call occurs upon page load and, at that point, determines the visitor’s qualifications for a particular experience. When the visitor’s profile qualifies the user to see a particular experience, all modifications made within the global mbox are then rendered.
A more granular method of implementing native Target audience rules is to apply these at the regional mbox level. This can be done by clicking “Add Audience Refinement” below a particular regional box name in the setup page of an activity. These location-specific refinements are essentially layered on top of any experience-level targeting or segmentation criteria.
For instance, you may be targeting your experience to all return visitors, and then apply an mbox refinement only to the homepage hero mbox to tailor your targeting in that particular placement even further (perhaps you want to geo target the hero banners, but not necessarily all other locations within the same experience). Regional mbox refinements can be extremely helpful when additional targeting criteria is needed, but only to a particular location. Creating similar locational granularity at the global mbox level would likely require additional experiences or activities in order to execute.
Another example of advanced targeting and tracking capabilities enabled via the regional mbox can be realized when leveraging mbox parameters. Useful visitor information, such as behavioral data, can be passed in each regional mbox call rather than merely once per page load in the global call. Placement-specific mbox params empower digital marketers to action on potentially more granular data points, which can improve the relevancy of the experience.
Visitor engagement reporting
By design, the innate granularity of regional mboxes offers marketers added perspective into onsite visitor behavior. For instance, the view or click of a particular regional mbox can tell you whether a visitor reached a certain step of the checkout flow, closed a pop-up modal or clicked through a promotional banner. Incorporating these location-specific events into the goal setting of an activity can be a useful addition to the traditional props and eVars you’re familiar with.
