Step 4: Creating your first treatment
How to create your first treatment
Last updated
How to create your first treatment
Last updated
After you have defined your model objective, the next step is to create the digital touchpoints that your users will interact with. At Auxia, we call these “treatments”.
A “treatment” refers to a specific variation (e.g. content card on home screen, email to inactive users, etc) that’s applied to a subset of users within an application to test its impact on user behavior, engagement, and other key performance metrics. The term originated from the field of causal inference to measure the nature of the relationship between cause and effect.
For example, you might be interested in understanding the impact of a “treatment” (e.g. a notification with a welcome offer for 15% a purchase) on your downstream performance metric (e.g. conversion rate).
In the Auxia platform, a treatment is highly flexible. You have the ability to fully customize each of the components of a treatment, including the content, layout, imagery, offer, and surface within your product. In our console, you will be able to fully configure each of these variables and when launched, Auxia returns a JSON response with the optimal variation for each customer.
Please see the image below for an example of a treatment.
To start creating treatments, you will first need to create a treatment type. A treatment type is a simple template that outlines how the treatment will be rendered in your mobile app or web application. For lifecycle treatments (e.g. emails, notifications, etc), Auxia has a standard format that is preconfigured.
The components of a type include:
Type name: The name you choose for your treatment type.
Surface: You can create multiple surfaces to dictate where in your product this type can be shown (e.g. product view page, cart page).
Delivery type: Where the type will be distributed (e.g. app, email, etc).
Content field: These are the fields you can customize, which will be sent in the JSON response.
Size: This defines the number of characters that can be used, allowing your team to customize how the treatment renders.
HTML enabled: This should only be toggled “on” for email treatments.
Translation enabled: This indicates whether or not the treatment should be translated into other languages.
Support generative: When toggled on, this allows this field to be filled by generated content.
For more detailed information, please visit the Surfaces and Types section.
After you have defined your type, you can begin creating treatments. To get there, click “Treatments” on the navigation bar, scroll down to “Overview”, and on the overview page, click the button “Create” in the upper right corner.
The components of a treatment include:
[Required] Name: The name for your treatment
[Required] Description: A brief description for your treatment
[Optional] Target Action: The specific action you want your treatment to drive
[Required] Type: The treatment's type you wish to select. See above for more details.
[Required] Language: The language you want the treatments to render in. You must select at least one language per treatment.
[Optional] Content fields: These fields store the content that will be rendered in the API response.
[Required] Start date: When the treatment will start being sent. Please note that only "Published" treatments will be visible to your application's end users.
[Optional] End date: When the treatment will be removed from distribution. This can be very short or very long depending on how long you want the treatment to be viewed.
[Optional] Tags: Any tags you want to highlight about the treatment or the content. This can help with filtering and viewing trends across different reports.
[Optional] Mutual exclusion group: Setting a mutual exclusion group allows any specific user to see only one treatment within the group. For example, let's say you want to create three variations of a treatment, but only want a specific user to see one of the three because the messages are very similar. If you add each to the mutual exclusion group, your users will only see at most one of the three treatments added to the group.
[Optional] Qualifying criteria: This criteria dictates which users are eligible for a treatment. For example, if you want to ensure that a specific treatment does not go to users who have already bought an item in the last 30 days, you can set a rule to restrict them from seeing this treatment.
Once treatments are created, you can push them all live to your users by selecting each treatment and clicking “Publish”.
However, if your team wants to QA a specific treatment, navigate to the “Manage” page and click on the “QA” section.
Auxia recommends QA testing how each different type of treatment renders in your application at least once before deploying to your users.
The diagram below illustrates how your team can set up a QA user in the Auxia console (“Manage” → “QA” → “Add QA user”). This set up ensures that the QA user that's added below (e.g. "testQAuser") always gets the configured treatment regardless of the qualifying criteria, in the response to GetTreatments API.
