Working with event patterns

An event pattern is a flexible way to personalize offers that are based on patterns of visitor activity. Using event patterns (also referred to as "behavior triggers"), you can test whether an event or a collection of events is occurring during an interaction and, if the specified pattern of event occurrences is met, to trigger one or more actions in response.

For example, you might define an event pattern such that, when a visitor views a certain combination of pages, or visits certain pages the specified number of times, a specific offer is presented. You can test for actions such as downloading certain documents, viewing specific media, and searching for different terms. For a call center, for example, events might include the reason for the interaction, or the service request that is initiated during the interaction.

You can define an event pattern to be specific to an Interactive Channel, or global to make it available across all Interactive Channels.

After you define the event patterns that are available for an Interactive Channel (either because they are defined in that IC, or because they are global), you can use them on your interactive flowchart. You can define Select, Decision, or PopulateSeg process boxes so that when an event pattern is matched (the event pattern state becomes true), the visitor is included in a predefined segment to which specific offers are then assigned.

Event patterns affect a visitor's interactive session with the runtime environment in the following ways:

When an interactive session starts, Interact tries to load any previous event pattern states that are associated with the current visitor's audience ID, if event pattern states exist.

When an event is posted, Interact updates the states and statuses of any event patterns that use the event.

If an event pattern is used during the session, such as during execution of an interactive flowchart, the status of the event pattern is retrieved.

When a session ends, the statuses of all the updated event patterns that are associated with the visitor's audience ID are stored in the database, if the audience ID is known (that is, the visitor's profile can be found in the profile data source). Otherwise, the event pattern states are discarded.

The advantage to this is that event pattern states are independent of user sessions, so that event activities from one user session are reflected in another session, as long as the audience ID matches and both sessions are active when those event activities happen.

Also, note that the event pattern states for unknown users are discarded by default at the end of the session, unless the configuration property interact | services | eventPattern | persistUnknownUserStates is set to TRUE or the session parameter UACISavePatternStates is set to TRUE.

If the audience ID changes in the middle of a session, Interact tries to load the saved event pattern states for the new audience ID. In the scenario that the previous audience ID is unknown and the configuration setting (interact | services | eventPattern | mergeUnknowUserInSessionStates) is set to true, or the session parameter UACIMergePatternStates is set to true, the user event activities that belongto the previous audience ID in the same session are merged into the new audience ID.

To add an event pattern