Campaign loading (deferred/ instant)

When you configure a campaign, you must define the way your campaign will load on the visitor’s website. Your campaign can be either embedded directly in the tag or downloaded only when required. This option has a direct impact on the tag performance.

Configuration

To determine how the campaign will load on your visitor’s website, you must select one of these 2 options:

• Deferred loading

• Instant loading

Deferred loading

This option is selected by default. The loading of your campaign is deferred, meaning that it will be downloaded afterwards, only when the targeting conditions are met and won’t be embedded in the AB Tasty tag. Once downloaded, the campaign will behave as usual. Therefore, the campaign won’t add weight to the tag, which avoids impacting the loading time of your website and slowing it down. This is particularly useful when you are running several experiments at a time on your account.

When selecting this option, the additional loading time should not exceed a few dozen milliseconds. When using this option, the targeting of every live campaign is still embedded in the tag. The tag will evaluate as fast as possible which campaigns the visitor needs to be exposed to (the campaigns where the visitor matches and respects the triggering conditions, if any), but will only download the deferred campaigns when they need to be applied. For example, if your campaign is targeted for mobile users only, it is not necessary to download it for desktop users.

Instant loading

When selecting this option, your campaign code, including the modifications, targeting, analytics, widgets, and so on, will be embedded directly into the AB Tasty tag. This means that all your visitors, even those who are not targeted by the campaign, will download its content. Selecting this option can drastically increase the size of the tag, and thus have a negative impact on its performance, especially if it is used in many heavy campaigns. We recommend using it only for very specific use cases (for instance when configuring a redirect test) and for a short period of time.

When changing the loading of a campaign, you must refresh the tag.

Use cases

Let’s say you have configured a campaign displaying a pop-in promoting your latest mobile application and targeting your mobile users only:

• If you select the deferred loading (default): The campaign will be downloaded and executed only for targeted visitors (in this case, for visitors on a mobile device). After an initial download from our servers cache, the campaign will be cached for 1 year (if no modifications are made) in the visitor browser for an instant loading each time the visitor sees the campaign.

• If you select the instant loading: The campaign will be downloaded for all visitors but executed only for those matching the targeting conditions. It will be cached in the tag for 30 seconds. A heavy campaign can add several KB of data for each visitor that will re-download the campaign when the cache expires (after 30 seconds). This may increase the execution time of the AB Tasty tag.