Verizon Wireless

For two and a half years I had been an integral part of the Test & Target team at Verizon Wireless. Using Adobe’s Target platform, HTML, CSS and JQuery it was our team’s responsibility to build out the personalization and target campaigns.   Some of these campaigns could be as easy as changing a text element to creating completely new content.  Many were very complicated though, such as when I had to break into the page’s AJAX calls in order for my code to make the necessary changes and keep those changes as the visitor interacted with various other elements on the page.

When I first arrived I was shown how the campaigns were coded.    The jQuery code was essentially all contained in one function, and we would have to code mobile, desktop, tablet and each of the experiences into separate “programs”. During my time there I had implement several standards to consolidate the coding into one.  I will write a couple of articles that contain some of the ways I accomplished this – but basically it involved dynamically adding classes to the body, various methods to dynamically add tracking code and much more.

Coding for Responsiveness

Another aspect I had to handle was responsiveness.  While Verizon’s website was not responsive, there is actually a desktop and mobile version that is displayed to the visitor, I liked to keep my code consolidated which required me to develop my campaigns in a responsive manner.  When I first started at Verizon, there was a THIRD version of the site which was tablet – later table visitors would just receive the desktop version.  One of the key issues I had to overcome with this was that the code base between desktop and mobile were NOT the same and my code would have to handle this.  This became a huge issue when I was working on the Trade-In page and had to handle breaking into the AJAX.  Desktop used straight Javascript for the AJAX, while mobile used JQuery.  I will have an article about this.

Adobe Test and Target Process

Below is a diagram of how the Verizon website would be modified through Test & Target.

1. Visitor enters the Verizon Wireless website
2. Adobe Test and Target determines if a campaign is running
   1. If campaign is running – Adobe Test and Target determines which experience to run based on its settings.  Usually the experiences were determined by percentages – such as 50% getting the control and 50% getting experience A.
      1. The code for the specific experience to modify the website is executed. The control would be the default website with no visible changes while  experience A, B, C,, etc contains various modifications to the site.
      2. Modified Verizon Website is shown to the visitor.
   2. If there is no campaign running -  default website is shown to the visitor.