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DocumentationAEM 6.5User Guide

Create and manage A/B test for adaptive forms create-and-manage-a-b-test-for-adaptive-forms

Last update: Wed May 22 2024 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

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Overview overview-br

Your customers are likely to abandon a form if the experience it delivers is not engaging. While it is frustrating for the customers, it can also upturn the support volume and costs for your organization. It is critical and challenging to identify and provide the right customer experience that increases the conversion rate. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager Forms holds the key to this problem.

AEM Forms integrates with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, an ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud solution, to deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences across multiple digital channels. One of the key capabilities of Target is A/B testing that lets you quickly set up concurrent A/B tests, present relevant content to targeted users, and identify the experience that drives better conversion rate.

With ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager (AEM) Forms, you can set up and run A/B tests on adaptive forms in real time. It also provides out-of-the-box and customizable reporting capabilities to visualize real-time performance of your form experiences and identify the one that maximizes user engagement and conversion.

Set up and integrate Target in AEM Forms set-up-and-integrate-target-in-aem-forms

Before you begin to create and analyze A/B tests for adaptive forms, you must set up your Target server and integrate it in AEM Forms.

Set up Target set-up-target

To integrate AEM with Target, ensure that you have a valid ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target account. When you register with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, you receive a client code. You need the client code, email associated with the Target account, and password to connect AEM with Target.

The Client Code identifies the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target customer account and is used as a sub-domain in the URL when calling the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target server. Before proceeding, log on to and, if you have access, view the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target option in the Quick Access section.

Integrate a running Target server with AEM Forms integrate-target-in-aem-forms

  1. On AEM server, go to https://<hostname>:<port>/libs/cq/core/content/tools/cloudservices.html.

  2. In the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target section, click Show Configurations and then the + icon to add a configuration.
    If you are configuring a target for the first time, click Configure Now.

  3. In the Create configuration dialog, specify a Title and optionally a Name for the configuration.

  4. Click Create. The Edit component dialog opens.

  5. Specify your Target account details, such as client code, email, and password.

  6. Select Rest from the API Type drop-down list.

  7. Click Connect to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target so you can initialize the connection with Target. If the connection is successful, the message Connection successful is displayed. Click OK on the message and then OK on the dialog. The Target account is configured.

  8. Create a Target framework as described in Add a framework.

  9. Go to https://<hostname>:<port>/system/console/configMgr.

  10. Click AEM Forms Target Configuration.

  11. Select a Target Framework.

  12. In the Target URLs field, specify all the URLs where A/B tests run. For example, https://<hostname>:<port>/ for AEM Forms Server on OSGi or https://<hostname>:<port>/lc/ for AEM Forms Server on JEE.
    Consider that you want to configure a Target URL for a Publish instance and your customers can access it using the hostname or the IP address. In such case, you must configure both as Target URLs - using the hostname and the IP address. If you configure only one of the URLs, your A/B test does not run for customers coming from the other URL. Click + to specify multiple URLs.

  13. Click Save.

Your Target server is integrated with AEM Forms. You can now enable A/B testing if you have a full license to use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target.

If you have a full license to use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, start the server with the following parameters after you integrate Target with AEM Forms:

parameter -Dabtesting.enabled=true java -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512M -jar -Dabtesting.enabled=true

If the AEM instance is running on JBoss®, started as a service from turnkey, in jboss\bin\standalone.conf.bat file, add -Dabtesting.enabled=true parameter in the following entry:

set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dadobeidp.serverName=server1 -Dfile.encoding=utf8 -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dabtesting.enabled=true"

In addition to JBoss® server, you can add -Dabtesting.enabled=true jvm argument in the server startup script for any application server. Now you can create and run A/B tests for adaptive forms.

NOTE
If you update the configured Target URLs later, ensure that you update any running A/B tests so that they point to the current URLs. For information about updating A/B tests, see Update A/B test.

Create audiences within AEM create-audiences-within-aem

AEM lets you create an audience, and use it for an A/B test. The audience you create within AEM is available in AEM Forms. To create audiences within AEM, do the following:

  1. In authoring instance, select ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager > Personalization > Audiences.

  2. In the Audiences page, select Create Audience > Create Target Audience.

  3. In the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target Configuration dialog, select a Target configuration and click Ok.

  4. In the Create New Audience page, create rules. Rules let you categorize the audience. For example, you want to categorize audiences based on operating system. Your audience A comes from Windows, and audience B comes from ³¢¾±²Ô³Ü³æ®.

    1. To categorize an audience based on Windows, in Rule #1, select the OS attribute type. From the When drop-down, select Windows.

    2. To categorize audience based on ³¢¾±²Ô³Ü³æ®, in Rule #2, select the OS attribute type. From the When drop-down, select ³¢¾±²Ô³Ü³æ®, and click Next.

  5. Specify a name for the created audience, and click Save.

You can select the audience when you configure A/B testing for a form, as shown below.

Create A/B test for an adaptive form create-a-b-test

  1. Go to Forms & Documents at https://<hostname>:<port>/aem/forms.html/content/dam/formsanddocuments.

  2. Navigate to the folder containing the adaptive form.

  3. Click the Select tool in the toolbar and select the adaptive form.

  4. Click More in the toolbar and select Configure A/B Testing. The Configure A/B testing page opens.

A/B test configuration page for adaptive forms

  1. Specify an Activity Name for the A/B test.

  2. From the Audience drop-down list, select an audience to whom you want to serve different experiences of the form. For example, Visitors Using Chrome. The audience list is populated from the configured Target server.

  3. In the Experience Distribution fields for experiences A and B, specify the distribution, in terms of percentage, to determine the distribution of experiences among the total audience. For example, if you specify 40, 60 for experiences A and B, respectively, the experience A is served to 40% of the audience and the remaining 60% see the experience B.

  4. Click Configure. A dialog appears to confirm the creation of the A/B test.

  5. Click Edit Experience B so you can open the adaptive form in edit mode. Modify the form by creating a different experience than the default experience A. The possible variations allowed in Experience B are changes in:

    • CSS or styling
    • Order of fields in different panels or the same panel
    • Panel layout
    • Panel titles
    • Description, label, and help text for a field
    • Scripts that do not impact or break the submit flow
    • Validations (both client and server sides)
    • Theme for experience B. (You can select an alternate theme for experience B)

  6. Go to the Forms and Documents UI, select the adaptive form, click More, and select Start A/B Testing.

Your A/B test is now running and the specified audience is randomly served the experiences based on the specified distribution.

Update the A/B test update-a-b-test

You can update the audience and experience distributions of a running A/B test.

To update the A/B test:

  1. In the Forms & Documents UI, navigate to the folder that contains the adaptive form on which the A/B test is running.

  2. Select the adaptive form.

  3. Click More and then select Edit A/B testing. The Update A/B testing page opens.

  4. Update the audience and experience distributions, as required.

  5. Click Update.

View and analyze A/B test report view-and-analyze-a-b-test-report

Once you have allowed the A/B test to run for the desired period, you can generate a report and check which experience has resulted in better conversion. You can declare the better performing experience a winner or choose to run another A/B test.

To view and analyze the A/B test report:

  1. Select the adaptive form, click More, and then click A/B Testing Report. The report gets displayed.

A/B Test report

  1. Analyze the report and see if you have enough data points to declare one of the better performing experiences as a winner. You can choose to continue with the same A/B test for more time or declare a winner and end the A/B test.
  2. To declare a winner and end the A/B test, click the End A/B test button on the reporting dashboard. A dialog box prompts you to declare one of the two experiences as the winner. Choose a winner and confirm to end the A/B test.
    Alternatively, you can first declare a winner by clicking the Declare Winner button for the respective experience. It prompts you to confirm the winner. Click Yes to end the A/B test.

If you picked experience A as the winner, the A/B test is put to an end and, going forward, only Experience A is served to audiences.

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