How to QA your Adobe Target campaigns
There are various ways to QA your Adobe Target campaigns, some are quicker and others more thorough ;-)
Once you tell Target your Staging and Development hosts, *unapproved* campaigns can be seen in your testing environment. To set this up go to: Host Group Administration, here you'll see a list of hosts where you can specify your; production, staging and development hosts. An added advantage of this approach is that you can specify users with editor rights only for creating campaigns while more senior users with publishing rights can approve and push to production.
It's possible that you don't have access to your production or development environment or maybe you just like doing things the quick way - yeehaw!
Once you've created your campaign and before clicking "Save & Approve" you need to do a couple of things;
1) Create a segment that requires a value in the URL that's not normally there, I'm using "QA123". It's also worth saving this segment as a future time-saver as it can become frequently used.
2) Once your campaign is approved with your QA parameter targeting you'll need to iterate through all your variations/experiences to validate they're looking and working correctly. This is possible by deleting cookies and refreshing your page in which case you'll want to install a browser plugin to make this easier such as "Remove cookies for site". Another approach is to set your campaign type to "Landing page campaign" - this allows multiple Experiences to be viewed per visit (through targeting) without the need of deleting cookies. You can now set your URL targeting at "Experience" level - for example; "QA123-Control", "QA123-Variant-A". This means you can see your variations/experiences, by going to these URLs; www.example.com?QA123-Control and www.example.com?QA123-Variant.
3) After you've approved your campaign, tested and you're happy, you'll need to go back one more time to remove your QA targeting and "Save & Approve".
Testing your campaigns in Staging
Once you tell Target your Staging and Development hosts, *unapproved* campaigns can be seen in your testing environment. To set this up go to: Host Group Administration, here you'll see a list of hosts where you can specify your; production, staging and development hosts. An added advantage of this approach is that you can specify users with editor rights only for creating campaigns while more senior users with publishing rights can approve and push to production.
Testing your campaigns in Production
It's possible that you don't have access to your production or development environment or maybe you just like doing things the quick way - yeehaw!
Once you've created your campaign and before clicking "Save & Approve" you need to do a couple of things;
1) Create a segment that requires a value in the URL that's not normally there, I'm using "QA123". It's also worth saving this segment as a future time-saver as it can become frequently used.
2) Once your campaign is approved with your QA parameter targeting you'll need to iterate through all your variations/experiences to validate they're looking and working correctly. This is possible by deleting cookies and refreshing your page in which case you'll want to install a browser plugin to make this easier such as "Remove cookies for site". Another approach is to set your campaign type to "Landing page campaign" - this allows multiple Experiences to be viewed per visit (through targeting) without the need of deleting cookies. You can now set your URL targeting at "Experience" level - for example; "QA123-Control", "QA123-Variant-A". This means you can see your variations/experiences, by going to these URLs; www.example.com?QA123-Control and www.example.com?QA123-Variant.
3) After you've approved your campaign, tested and you're happy, you'll need to go back one more time to remove your QA targeting and "Save & Approve".
Summary
Depending on your environment hopefully one of these approaches works, needless to say the most bulletproof stance would be to combine QA in both staging and production. When you have many campaigns running at once you may want to read this post on monitoring and reporting: http://richardhayes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/monitoring-your-adobe-target-campaigns.html
