Environments
Organize your sites and pre-production environments for easy management and separated reporting.
Hosts are bundled into environments for ease of management. For example, you might have dozens of hosts grouped in two or three environments. The preset environments include Production, Staging, and Development. You can add new environments and rename your environments, if desired.
One environment, the default environment, is pre-named Production. This default environment cannot be deleted, even if you rename it. Target assumes that this is where you will serve final, approved activities and tests.
When a Target request is received from new websites or domains, these new domains always appear in the Production environment. The Production environment cannot have its settings changed, so unknown or new sites are guaranteed to see only content that is active and ready. Host management also lets you easily ensure the quality of new activities and content in your test, staging, and development environments before you activate the activities.
To manage environments, click Administration > Environments.
Add an environment section_32097D0993724DF3A202D164D3F18674
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From the Environments list, click Add Environment.
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Specify a descriptive name for the environment.
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Specify the desired active mode for the environment: Active Activities or Active and Inactive Activities.
If you specify Active and Inactive Activities, hosts from this environment also display inactive activities.
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Click Save.
Set the default environment for reporting section_4F8539B07C0C45E886E8525C344D5FB0
You can select the environment you want to use as the default for all activity reports.
If you use Production as your default, all unknown hosts automatically are added here and report data from there is included in the default report view. Instead, creating a “clean” environment ensures only your core sites/domains are included.
To set the default environment for reporting:
- From the Environments list, click the Star icon
Change the name of an environment section_9F5F94285F8E495E9CE69810CE94CA08
- From the Environment list, click the Edit icon.
- Change the environment name.
- Click Save.
Delete an environment section_737F8869612047868D03FC755B1223D3
You can delete an environment when it is no longer needed.
- From the Environment list, click the Delete icon.
- Click Delete to confirm the deletion.
[Premium]{class="badge positive" title="See what's included in Target Premium."} Recommendations: filter collections and exclusions by environment (host group)
You can preview the contents of Recommendations collections and exclusions for a selected environment (host group).
An environment can be used to separate the available items in your catalog for different uses. For example, you can use host groups for Development and Production environments, different brands, or different geographies. By default, preview results in Catalog Search, Collections, and Exclusions are based on the default host group. (You can also select a different host group to preview results, by using the Environment filter.) By default, newly added items are available in all host groups unless an environment ID is specified when creating or updating the item.
If you don’t see your products, make sure that you are using the correct host group. For example, if you set up your recommendation to use a staging environment and you set your host group to Staging, you might need to re-create your collections in the staging environment for the products to show. To see which products are available in each environment, use Catalog Search with each environment. You can also preview the contents of Recommendations collections and exclusions for a selected environment (host group).
The Environment filter is available from the following places in the Target UI:
- Catalog Search (Recommendations > Catalog Search)
- Create Collection dialog box (Recommendations > Collections > Create New)
- Update Collection dialog box (Recommendations > Collections > Edit)
- Create Exclusion dialog box (Recommendations > Exclusions > Create New)
- Update Exclusion dialog box (Recommendations > Exclusions > Edit)