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AJO - Dynamic Optimisation - Deploying an Experiment in a Journey

Minimum settings for configuring a journey for use with Jacquard

Updated over a week ago

Once you've created your custom action, you're ready to move on to journey configuration.

Throttling

First, you'll read the audience profiles into the journey, this will need to be throttled at up to 1,000 records per second.

Custom Action

Next, you will add the phraseeRealtimeAPI Custom Action into the journey canvas from the Actions section of the menu:

Now, you will configure the Action.

No further access configuration is required so set this to none.

The crucial step is with the endpoint configuration, specifically the configuration of the three query parameters:

Campaign_id is taken from the Jacquard UI, if you're not sure where, check this out.

Recipient_id and Delivery_id are populated by AJO fields, specifically some Journey Properties:

It'll look like this once done:

Now that the Action is configured, you are able to use the response to this API call for personalisation in messages.

Personalise Message

Let's start with using the Jacquard generated language in an email subject line, but the same process applies for other content types.

Opening the Personalization Dialog next to the subject field, you need to navigate to the Contextual attributes > Journey Properties > Actions menu to access the phraseeRealtimeAPI content.

The attribute you need to use bring the content into the subject line is variant_text. You will need to wrap the attribute in a third set of handlebars in order to render the text correctly (without any html encoded funny business - see below for an explanation of this.)

Explain this to me please

In Handlebars, the values returned by the {{expression}} are HTML-escaped. If the expression contains &, then the returned HTML-escaped output is generated as &. If you don’t want Handlebars to escape a value, use the “triple-stash”.

Replacer Variables

But what if you have replacer variables in your subject lines, like first name, or product? Things get a little smoky in this room and you have to use some other functions to replace the merge tags.

For example, Jacquard-generated language contains a placeholder variable (helpfully named NAME_MERGE_TAG in this example) that needs to be replaced with a customer's first name.

First, add the let helper function to the canvas:

Rename the variable to subject, and add the third set of handlebars to the output:

Replace the expression with the replace helper function (found under string functions):

Replace the first string within the replace function with the variant text from the phraseeRealtimeAPI (found via the contextual attributes menu as above):

Note the ` around the action-id if copying from elsewhere.

Replace the second string with the placeholder variable (remember this example uses NAME_MERGE_TAG), noting the " marks that turn the value red:

Finally, replace the third string placeholder with the customer's first name from the profile attributes:

This code snippet is reusable as the action-ID won't change between journeys, so it's recommended to save this snippet as a Fragment for convenience.

If you have multiple replacer tags in use, you can repeat the process with a new let/replace function, just be sure to update the outputting variable to the fully replaced one:

Now, you've got personalised Jacquard-generated content into your subject lines. But there's one more code snippet needed to record opens and send them back to Jacquard.

Open Pixel

You need to add a small code snippet into the email html, just above the closing </body> tag.

Whether you are coding in HTML, or using the drag and drop interface, the code snippet required is:

<img src=<add statistics_URL from Contextual Attributes> width="1px" height="1px">

You will need to replace the src in the above. You can find the statistics_url in the same Contextual attributes > Journey Properties > Actions menu as before:

We also recommend saving this snippet as a Fragment for ease of reuse.

At this point, you've complete your minimum journey configuration for use with Jacquard. You're ready to configure the rest as you normally would and publish the journey.

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