Automatic Main Variant Selection

To access the main job delivery settings page for a given A/B-split job on the A/B-split job details page, click the Delivery Settings section.

Note: The A/B-split job must have been defined with type "Sampling A/B-Split" and all sampling variants must be defined completely and their delivery must be authorized. The "Use a tracking metric to define the main job automatically" option must be chosen for the main job's settings.

On this screen you define when and how the main variant for an A/B-split job with sampling (with automatic main variant selection) is picked by LISTSERV Maestro.

First, define the amount of time that LISTSERV Maestro shall wait after the delivey of the last sampling variant. This time is necessary to allow tracking events (triggered by recipients acting on the message) to be registered. Note that, with individual delivery settings for the sampling variants, there can be a significant delay between the delivery of the first and the last sampling variant, which means that the effective period length can be larger for the first sampling variant than it is for the last sampling variant.

The length of this period also effectively determines the moment at which LISTSERV Maestro actually selects the winning variant.

Next, define how LISTSERV Maestro shall select the winning variant. Depending on your choice, the winning variant will be the one with the highest open rate, click rate or share count. Note that only those choices are available that are supported by all sampling variants.

Now that you have defined how and when LISTSERV Maestro shall select the winning variant, you also need to specify when to deliver the main variant. For this you have four choices:

Send Immediately: LISTSERV Maestro will start the delivery of the main variant immediately after it has selected the winner.
Use this choice if the delivery time is not important and you want the main job to go out as soon as possible.
Send When Triggered: LISTSERV Maestro will postpone the delivery of the main variant until the moment when delivery is triggered explicitly. This means that the authorized job remains ongoing until this trigger happens. The delivery can be triggered manually from inside of LISTSERV Maestro or through an external trigger of the type "Simple URL Access" (see below).
Use this choice if you require a special delivery time that is determined externally to LISTSERV Maestro.

Note: If delivery is triggered at any time before LISTSERV Maestro has selected the winner, triggering will fail and the job remains ongoing. This failure does not require any special action by the triggering client other than attempting the same action at a later time, when the winner selection time has arrived.
Send at Winner's Delivery Time: After LISTSERV Maestro has selected the winner, it will look at the original delivery time of the winner and will start delivery of the main variant at the next occurrence of this time, which may be either today or tomorrow.
Use this choice if the time of the day is important for your delivery, but the actual day is not, and you want to use the same time as was used by the winner. This option implies an additional delay of the main variant of up to 24 hours.
Send at Winner's Delivery Weekday and Time: After LISTSERV Maestro has selected the winner, it will look at the original delivery weekday and time of the winner and will start delivery of the main variant at the next occurrence of this time on the same weekday, which may be today or whenever is the next occurrence of the same weekday.
Use this choice if both the time of the day and the weekday are important for your delivery and you want to use the same weekday and time as was used by the winner. This option implies an additional delay of the main variant of up to 7 days.
Send at the Next Occurrence of the Following Time: After LISTSERV Maestro has selected the winner, it will wait until the next occurrence of the specified time, which may be either today or tomorrow, and will then start delivery of the main variant.
Use this choice if the time of the day is important for your delivery, but the actual day is not, and you want to use a specific time that may differ from the delivery time that was used by the winner. This option implies an additional delay of the main variant of up to 24 hours.

At the bottom of the screen you see an overview of the delivery schedule, starting with the sampling delivery. The time given here is taken from the delivery settings of the sampling variants and thus describes the begin of the event collection wait period, per your configuration. Next you see the time when LISTSERV Maestro selects the winning variant. The last time given is moment of final delivery, calculated depending on all choices you make on the screen. All dates/times given in this section are updated each time you change any of the settings on the screen to give you an indicator of the actual time of final delivery.

Once you have prepared these settings, you then only have to authorize the delivery of the main variant job. The rest will automatically be handled by LISTSERV Maestro, without further input from you (except triggering the delivery, see above):

After the delivery of the last sampling variant, LISTSERV Maestro will wait for the specified amount of time to allow tracking events to collect, as described above.
Once the waiting time as elapsed, LISTSERV Maestro will use the tracking data collected to select the winning sampling variant by picking the one with the highest value for the specified metric, as described above.
When the winning variant has been selected, LISTSERV Maestro will automatically copy its subject, message body, sender and tracking definition to the main variant and will then schedule the delivery of the main variant according to the specified schedule setting, as described above.
The main variant will then wait in the list of outgoing mail jobs until its delivery time has come, at which point LISTSERV Maestro will start its delivery and move it to the completed mail jobs list after delivery has finished.

Note: With the option "Send When Triggered" selected, LISTSERV Maestro evaluates the collected tracking data including the events that arrive until the moment when delivery is triggered. In other words: Winner selection is postponed until the time when delivery is triggered.

External Triggers

LISTSERV Maestro offers several actions that can be triggered remotely from an external source by simply accessing a special external trigger URL, via the HTTP protocol. This trigger URL can be accessed without the need to first login to LISTSERV Maestro.

With this, several scenarios are possible:

If there are actions that need to be triggered manually by a user who does not want to login to LISTSERV Maestro first; then, the user could create bookmarks in his browser, where each bookmark contains a trigger URL and stands for an action that can be triggered. Or, perhaps a custom-made HTML page could be created with links that point to the trigger URLs.
In a different scenario, these actions could be triggered by another process, such as a script or program. To trigger an action, all this other process has to do is to open a HTTP communication to the action's trigger URL. This type of external process could, for example, trigger an action according to a certain time schedule or each time a certain outside event happens.

To secure the external trigger URLs against unauthorized access, a security token needs to be included in each URL. Each action that can be triggered externally has a unique security token. Therefore, the security token in the URL serves two purposes: It identifies the action that is to be triggered, and it validates that the user or process that makes this request is indeed authorized to do so.

The security token for the action in question can be obtained from inside of the LISTSERV Maestro user interface. The exact location where the token can be obtained depends on the action that it stands for. Please see the description of the action in question for this information.

Important: You should make sure that this security token is not given out to unauthorized persons because anyone who knows the security token of a certain action is able to trigger this action, as long as he also has HTTP access to the LISTSERV Maestro server. If you suspect that an unauthorized person has gained access to the token, then you can create a new token (and invalidate the existing token) by clicking the appropriate link at the location where you obtained the token.

A trigger URL always has the following form:

http://SERVER_NAME/lui/externalAction.do?token=SECURITY_TOKEN

where SERVER_NAME is replaced with the name of your LISTSERV Maestro server. (If a non-standard HTTP port is used, also include the port, separated with a colon ":". If access to your LISTSERV Maestro is protected with HTTPS, you need to specify "https://" instead of "http://".)
where SECURITY_TOKEN is replaced with the security token for the action that the URL shall trigger.

External triggers come in two variants:

Simple URL Access: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP GET request.

By accessing this URL, a HTTP GET request is made to LISTSERV Maestro. The server then first verifies the given security token and, if it is valid, triggers the corresponding action. The result of the action is returned in the form of a HTTP response.

If everything went well, a response with the status code "200 - OK" is returned. In this case, the response body contains the result of the action. Most actions return a simple "OK" text in the result, but some actions may also return more data in the result; for example, if the purpose of the action was to download certain data from LISTSERV Maestro.

If there was a problem executing the action, a response with a different status code is returned, such as "404 - Not Found" if an invalid security token was specified.
URL Access with Additional Data: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP POST request.

In contrast to the "simple URL access" of above, the trigger URL must be accessed with a HTTP POST request, and the additional data that is necessary for the action must be included as part of the request body. The data that is required depends on the action in question. Please see the description of the action for this information.

The result of the action is returned in form of a HTTP response, just like for the "simple URL access". Please see above for details.