When you’re leveraging Dynamic Motivation, your campaigns are being powered by Persado’s Adaptive Algorithm. This algorithm uses a contextual multi-armed bandit (cMAB), which optimizes the best Variant on a per user basis using the user’s attribute data.
But how are Variants produced, and why might you see Variants with an "e" appended in your reporting platform? These are Epsilon Variants, and this article will break down how they fit into our cMAB process.
What is an “Epsilon Variant?”
Epsilon Variants are a portion of traffic from Persado Variants that are allocated for the training of the Adaptive Algorithm. The learnings from the Epsilon group are then applied to the non-Epsilon Variants, which are dynamically served on a per user basis.
This means that in your reporting platform, you will see all Variants that were deployed (likely 8 of them) and then see all those Variants a second time with an “e” appended. Keep the following in mind when reviewing these results:
To understand your performance in market, we’ll always compare the overall performance of the Persado Variants to your control message. Epsilon Variants are included in the Persado group.
Weights for the Epsilon group may change over time at the discretion of Persado’s Data Science team, who monitors their performance. The Epsilon Variants are “always on” at a certain percentage so we can continually train the model.
Epsilon Variants in Context
Here’s how Epsilon Variants would be used in a typical web campaign.
Generate Content: After you request a campaign, Persado generates Variants bespoke to your audience and campaign.
Approve and Export: Once you approve all Variants, Persado will work with you to insert the script into your site or through a tag manager.
Note: Epsilon Variants won’t require any additional approvals (e.g., V1 and V1e are the same).
Deploy and Retrieve Results: When the campaign is live, the Persado webscript calls the Persado API, which randomly assigns a Variant to each visitor but begins to adapt to engagement rates as it receives more response data. The Epsilon Variants are deployed as a percentage of traffic that we use to train the algorithm. The Persado API will then dynamically shift traffic allocation to higher performing Variants and adjust if engagement rates change.
Analyze: You’ll view Variant-by-Variant engagement rates over the lifetime of your campaign in Persado Portal. Portal reporting will focus on the performance of Persado Variants vs. your control (Epsilon Variants + non-Epsilon Variants make up the Persado group).